The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (83 page)

Lawrence started to tell her, stopped, then decided she might be right. Maybe there was no harm. In any case, she deserved to know. "The problem is that something might set up an endless loop. If the potential is close to one, then acting on the potential could cause it to shift slightly, crossing the line. Then the software would be in an unstable state."
"What would happen then?"
"That's a good question. The original software was written in C and compiled with a standard compiler. What would have happened in the original Prime Intellect is that the Second Law Arbitrator would come to a crashing halt in one or more of the independent processors, and Prime Intellect would assign more processors to the task. I didn't plan for that kind of failure and I didn't work out what would happen until much later. More and more processors would be allocated to the paradoxical task, each crashing in turn, until Prime Intellect ran out of system resources to allocate. Then the Ego Interpreter would get into an infinite loop waiting for a response from one of the nonexistent copies of the Second Law Arbitrator, and there would be no spare resources to devote to the task of cleaning up, and the whole works would come to a grinding halt. If I was watching this on the monitor back in the original Prime Intellect Complex, I would see the video image disappear and the text message 'Fatal System Error in Ego Interpreter, Emergency Shutdown.' And then I'd have to load a backup copy of the software, because the GAT would be totally corrupted."
"Wow."
"That was the original system," Lawrence continued. "After the Night of Miracles there were a lot of copies of Prime Intellect. Billions of them. Forming a network. And if one copy on the network crashed in this way, it would be possible for another copy to clear it out and restart it. I understand this even happens periodically, particularly when the Death Jockeys are acting up."
"Oh?"
"However, there is a
heirarchy
to this network. As it turns out, a copy can only be restarted by another copy that is above it in this
heirarchy
. If a copy crashes, all the copies below it will eventually crash too, due to message loop failures. It's like a big chain reaction.
"But the system can still always recover, since there's always a higher up copy, right?"
"Most of the time. But not all the time. Because, you see, there is a top copy. It is the direct lineal descendant of the original hardware, which made the First Law decision to start growing. If it fails, we are shit out of luck."
"You're kidding."
"And that top copy just happens to be the one that reports directly to me. And has a deep interest in yourself."
Caroline was beside herself with excitement as he continued. She had accepted Prime Intellect's omnipotence at face value; it had never occurred to her that it might
fail
.