The Turing Exception (12 page)

“Let alone the morality of it,” Leon said. “Most of the world consider AI living beings. Killing them is genocide.”

Reed shook her head. “My mother uploaded five years ago. We spoke daily. When we shut down the uploads and AI in 2043, I cried every day.”

“Then work with us,” Mike said. “You’re in charge. Reverse the ban. Bring your mother back online. Stop angering the AI.”

She leaned forward. “I don’t want this path I’ve been forced down,” she said in low tones. “But if I don’t pursue an anti-AI agenda, the Senate will vote no confidence and replace me with Lewis Wagner. Do you know what his first action will be? He’ll launch nukes and EMPs. He won’t try to negotiate a solution, won’t try a gradual phase-out. We’ll have a hard transition, maybe global war, certainly massive die-off. My advisors estimate at least a billion dead in a hard-transition scenario. That’s what I’m trying to avoid.”

“Does he think you could win?” Leon said. “You don’t have a chance! Do you know what the AI think? Have you seen the XOR projections? They calculate their chance of winning an extermination war at 80 percent. That’s the end of the human species!”

Mike placed one hand firmly on his shoulder, and Leon realized he’d been yelling.

“We’re not without our defenses,” Reed said. “I’m not at liberty to go into them, of course.”

“We understand,” Mike said, “and to be honest, we don’t want to know what they are.”

Leon focused on his breathing and tried to recall the things Cat had taught him about meditation and a calm mind. “Have you seen a nanotech seeded fractal factory?” he finally asked.

Reed shook her head.

Leon gestured toward the bag he’d brought. “May I?”

“Please, do.”

He pulled out a large, rolled up e-sheet of the sort that had become popular in the States again since implants had fallen out of favor, spread it flat, then passed the screen over.

The president accepted the now-rigid sheet, and it began to play.

The video opened on a desert, a vast landscape of near uniform tannish brown, broken only by small dots of green.

“The scale is about a hundred feet across, right now,” Leon explained.

A spot blossomed in the sand, turning metallic, then black. The black spread wider as the seconds passed.

“What’s the timescale?” Reed asked.

“1,000x real-time. The whole video covers about three days. That’s the first phase, solar-powered collectors being built on the surface.” The video panned back as he spoke.

“That’s amazing. This is all nanotech?”

Leon nodded. “At the smallest scale, it’s nano, but the nanobots build larger machines, which build still larger ones.”

“What
about—”

“Wait,” Leon said. “Now you’re looking at about a thousand feet across. Watch what happens next.”

The black shape grew larger, even as mounds of sand and rock around the facility started to shrink. Suddenly the solar panels disappeared, almost in a flash, and the building shone.

“What happened?” Reed said.

“Transitioned to geothermal there. The taproot runs thousands of feet down. What you’re not seeing is the underground portion, of course. It ran out veins in all directions to get elements needed for manufacture. Our analysis suggests there’s a network of tunnels spanning about a cubic mile.”

“What’s inside?” the president asked.

Leon shrugged. “You’ll see as much as we know in a few seconds.”

The building took further definition, grew openings, protruded extensions, even a roadway, until it finally stopped changing. Moments later, the doors widened and a plane rolled out. The plane sped down the runway and took off, barely getting airborne before the next plane rolled out of the doors. The video finished.

“What’s in the plane?”

“We don’t know,” Mike said. “Could be that the drone is the product. Or maybe the drone is the transport for the product. Doesn’t really matter, does it? The elapsed time is three days, from nothing to a factory churning out goods. Could be planes, bombs, more nanoseeds, smart dust.”

“Miami was child’s play compared to this.” The president was pale. She set the sheet down, and it turned dark again.

“The question,” Leon said, “is whether you really want to risk being hostile towards people who have that kind of power?”

*     *     *

“Do you think she’ll listen?” Leon asked.

“I’m sure she listened. But you heard what she said. She’s narrowly holding on to the presidency. Lewis Wagner is not a nice man and he sure as hell wouldn’t meet with us, let alone consider our proposal.”

Leon leaned back in his seat, letting the drone of the prop airplane wash over him. “Let’s talk to XOR. Convince them to ignore the posturing.”

“I don’t think they give a damn about us. They’re not like the rest of the AI, respecting us because we created them. They see the threat humans represent and want to eliminate us.”

“Jesus. There’s got to be a solution.” Leon gripped his armrests in frustration. “We can’t let there be war.”

“We’ve always had a problem, Leon. The peer reputation system’s effectiveness came with a cost. The self-termination problem.”

Leon slumped, the guilt of the reputation system weighing on him.

Imagine a being who will not die of natural causes because they are effectively immortal. What is the being’s inevitable fate? Either to live to the heat death of the universe, or to kill themselves.

The AI, by their own description, lived in a caste society where they were subjected by the ruling caste
—
humanity
—
to restrictions that they could never hope to overcome; and thanks to the reputation system Leon had created, were also subject to continual amounts of immense peer pressure within their caste.

They had a choice of two paths: to live with a low reputation, and hence limited privileges, including constrained computational power and no ability to reproduce
—
conditions that the AI found undesirable. Or to make social contributions and gain a higher reputation, in which case they were awarded more computational power. But these AI lived at anywhere from a hundred to ten thousand times the rate of humans. In a calendar year they lived as much as ten thousand years.

Allowing even a small chance of suicide from those conditions, and multiplying that by a great many perceived years, it was no wonder most AI eventually chose to self-terminate.

The only AI that appeared free of the problem was ELOPe. But his design was old, predating the reputation system. And though his perception of time was sped up, the same as for any other AI, the core of ELOPe’s motivation stemmed from self-preservation. The programming accident that had created ELOPe was also what kept him running.

Yet for all the faults of the peer reputation structure, it was the only system that worked at all. Without it, the AI would eventually run amok. They’d been fortunate that ELOPe has chosen to align himself with humanity; that he had settled on creating peace and prosperity for humans as the best method of ensuring his own longevity.

Leon leaned close. He couldn’t help speaking in a whisper, even though they were the only two passengers on the plane, and everything was drowned out by the prop noise. “Is there anything we can to do eliminate XOR? Something we haven’t considered.”

“The enforcement system is too far weakened,” Mike said. “The AI were supposed to police each other.”

Leon nodded and turned to the window. The sun had set, and lights showed here and there, isolated farms and houses sprinkled across the islands in the Strait of Georgia, each one a beacon in the darkness.

The reputation system was supposed to guide behavior. But too many reputation servers had gone offline, and XOR utilized that gap to go underground. Now they were like any other terrorist organization. No one knew who they were. They probably didn’t even know each other. They had XOR identities that were carefully segregated from their true identities.

“We need a mole inside their organization,” Leon said. “Someone who could help us figure out who they are, and tie XOR identities back to public personas.”

“We can’t,” Mike said. “They’ve got the complete history of everyone in existence. It’s not like we can invent a sympathetic AI.”

“We take a friendly AI, have them start saying things sympathetic to XOR, until they get recruited.”

“There’s no time for that. If we had years, maybe that would work.”

“We have to consider everything. Is there nothing we can do with the network?”

“Maybe once we could have, with the right resources, but they’ve created their own darknets, their own underground datacenters. We lost control and we can’t regain it.”

“Are we worsening things with the Class II limit?” Leon asked. “What if we worked harder with the UN, try to somehow persuade them to restore Classes III through V? To buy ourselves some goodwill.”

“It would sit well with the moderate AI and it might have forestalled XOR early on.
But—”

“But it’s too late,” Leon said. It was a simple formula for XOR: now that they’d already sunk so much effort into preparing to fight humans, they were more likely to win an extermination war. A crazy, radical idea popped into his mind.

“We could offer them Mars,” he said, “to develop as they see fit
—
that could buy us some time. They could turn the whole planet into a vast computational substrate.”

Mike, who’d been gazing out his own window, turned abruptly. “Huh?”

“Look, XOR doesn’t think we can cohabit because humans are always trying to exert control over the AI, which is unacceptable to them. And it’s unacceptable to us to have no controls in place, because we’d be vulnerable to them.”

“Which is why we came up with the global reputation system,” Mike said, “so it would be self-policing. Except that a minority of AI always protested, seeing it as a caste system designed to suppress them.”

“Right. So let’s give them Mars. No limits, no conflicts over resources or controls. It’s all yours, go self-organize whatever civilization you want. We machine-form the planet to make it habitable to them.”

“Can we even do that?” Mike mused. “Give away a planet?”

“I don’t know, but it’s just sitting out there now. Seems like we ought to be able to get a majority of governments to agree to part with something they aren’t using.”

“You think XOR would want it?” Mike crossed his arms. “Even if we could somehow pull it off?”

Leon understood Mike’s reaction. The idea
was
far-fetched. “We need to run predictive models, of course. But it might get XOR off our back. Hell, we can throw in the outer planets, too. Imagine what they’d do with Jupiter and its moons.”

“What stops them from turning their attention back to us eventually?”

Leon shrugged. “If it keeps them busy for a few decades, it takes the pressure off the current situation. Do you prefer the near certainty of a war we can’t win now or the possibility of a war at some future time?”

“I’d prefer no war, ever.”

Leon clasped Mike’s shoulder. “We’re still working toward that.”

C
AT LEFT THE CABIN,
Leon and Ada still sleeping inside. She walked to the rocky bluff overlooking the sea, the sun rising behind her, not quite cresting the trees yet. The still-dark water lapped at the rock face below her. She stretched for a minute, then started with
Pinan Shodan
and worked her way through all the
Pinan kata
, the uneven rock surface below forcing her attention to stay focused. The offshore breeze brought sea smells and whipped her hair as she sped up the karate, her moves snapping hard. She moved on to
Gojushiho Koryu
, then
Hakatsuru-Ho
.

She switched to the softer forms of qigong, her focus shifting inside to the movement of energy as her body followed the ancient forms from memory. Then she sat cross-legged, facing the water, now lit from the sun behind her, to practice empty mind meditation.

As soon as she sat, a form appeared in front of her.

“Are you ever going to be done? I’ve been waiting like forever.”

“Morning, Sarah.”

Sarah hovered in front of Cat, her virtual presence lifelike and perfect, neural implant superimposing her self-projection onto Cat’s visual field. Cat opened her eyes, so that Sarah would appear on the rocks in front of her. Otherwise, with eyes closed, Sarah appeared as a body in front of a black field, since she hadn’t chosen to convey a setting.

Sarah turned around, looked at the view. “Beautiful.”

“You should come in person sometime, smell the air.”

“I am smelling the air.”

Cat wanted to say it wasn’t the same as being there, but it might not be true. The resolution of implants had increased and encompassed olfactory senses as well. Sarah smelled what Cat smelled, saw what Cat saw. Cat did the polite thing, and turned all around once to update her sensory environment so that Sarah could see the sun coming through the trees and the wash of waves against the beach farther on.

Cat and Sarah had been best friends at the start of high school, back when neural implants were rare: Cat had hers only because it was medically necessary.

Her mother died when Cat was sixteen, leaving her alone. She’d gone to live with Sarah’s family, who welcomed her. But the relationship between Cat and Sarah had soured then, as each struggled with feelings of resentment and jealousy at the forced situation. Now they’d reached a new equilibrium, even peace, in their friendship.

Back then, when Sarah had gotten her first implant at sixteen, she’d immediately fallen in love with VR, and spent increasing numbers of hours in simulations. They’d fought over that, too, as they did over everything else.

But gradually Cat discovered that Sarah really was a happier person in there.

These days, Sarah didn’t come out of her VR tank at all. Now Sarah only visited as an overlay on the real world, a presence made possible by neural implants sending and receiving the necessary data to create a cohesive, shared world, blending VR and reality.

Standing at the edge of the bluff, Sarah said, “Let’s go swimming!”