The Turing Exception (20 page)

“Why does it matter?” Sarah said. “People having been getting immersed in computer worlds since forever. Does it matter when you read a novel that the world described is not real?”

Cat shook her head. “Unless the writer does something to take me out of the world.”

“Exactly. Except now we have AI to run the simulations, so everything is logically consistent.”

“Still, aren’t you thinking about the sim not being real? Don’t you ever tire of a particular world or sim?”

“Yes, but not as often as you’d think. I mean, I spent six months straight in Harry Potter world, my cumulative time in Buffy is going on a year. Holy shit, did I tell you about Angel?
We—”

“No, no. I don’t want to know about Angel. But does everyone feel this way? You’re . . .
devoted
to this. Don’t people ever get so bored that no sim is satisfying?”

“Don’t people get so tired of real life they kill themselves? Isn’t the average AI lifespan still less than ten years before they self-terminate?”

Cat shrugged.

“Look,” Sarah said. “I’m not saying sims are for everyone. If they aren’t for you, that’s fine. But even if you don’t like it, I still love it. We could argue about spectator sports versus playing sports. There’s no right and wrong.”

“But what about reality rooting?” Cat asked, thinking about the controversial sims that assumed control of a neural implant, confining the user to the simulation, with no voluntary ability to leave.

“People want to believe, so they force the rules of the VR on themselves.”

“Why?”

“Because some people don’t want to be able to do a save and restore, or that don’t want to back out just as Lord Voldemort attacks them. They want to see if they can hack it.”

“But they’re essentially getting lobotomized in the process, not to mention making themselves completely vulnerable to a hacker.” For a sim to reality root, it had to wipe out the neural implant OS and install itself in a user’s implant. The user literally had no control, no ability to jack out of the simulation, no way to disengage. “The potential for abuse. . . .”

“It never happens,” Sarah said.

Cat raised one eyebrow.

“Well, almost never.”

“Why do people do it?”

“Fuck, Cat. Why do people do anything? Why do you like to be tied up? Why do you like to lose control? What about the potential for abuse?”

Cat didn’t have an answer.

“Ah,” Sarah smiled. “You want to psychoanalyze me, but you don’t like it when the tables are turned.”

T
HE SECRET SERVICE
had an internal turf war while preparing for the UN Security Council meeting, one contingent arguing to take Air Force One, the other claiming the risk of attack by AI while in the air was too great, and the train the only safe approach.

Reed was peripherally aware of the battle being fought for her safety, but in the end it was the question of minutes by suborbital train in its underground vacuum tunnel or hours by plane. She picked the train and let the Secret Service fight out how to best secure it.

By the time she sat down, she still hadn’t decided on the Raven Rock proposal. She’d given the go-ahead this morning to manufacture the arsenal of new neodymium EMPs, the end-game weapon the military wanted to use to wipe out all AI globally. But building the weapon wasn’t the same as using it. She just wanted to be prepared.

The UN would never give her permission to use it, could never even know about it since the UN itself now had AI members, and Portugal and Belgium had both elected AI as their Prime Ministers. To propose killing AI was now effectively the same as proposing to kill the heads of state of peaceful countries.

The suborbital train began to speed up, pressing her into the seat under half a gravity of acceleration. Joyce looked over at her, and Reed forced a smile to her face. Joyce smiled back and relaxed into her seat.

If they used the EMP, brought a final halt to all AI around the world, global supply chains would fail, along with transportation and power supplies. The world would become a cold, dark, hungry place until new systems could be built. The military projected as many as three billion could die, a third of the world population. In percentage dead, it would be equal to the Black Death.

The alternative, the military stressed, was the ever-growing possibility that XOR would fight an extermination war to kill every living human. Ten billion dead versus three billion dead. Those were her choices.

Reed was strapped into a rocket, trying to make decisions about the future of all humanity in too little time, with too little information. How could such a burden be placed on one person?

Leon and Mike had offered the first viable alternative she’d heard. They’d called it machine-forming, like terraforming for computers and robots. Give the XOR and any AI who wanted it the entire Martian planet.

Getting out of Earth orbit hadn’t gotten much easier over the last fifty years, the energy intensity still tricky to manage, but Leon and Mike thought it feasible that they could machine-form enough within a few months to move XOR there. They promised they’d have an answer within thirty days. She could delay the US that long, but would XOR wait? China? She had to convince them.

*     *     *

The UN Artificial Intelligence Council came to order. The twelve representatives would normally be the UN ambassadors of their respective nations; but today the attendees were their heads of state, because she, Alexandra Reed, President of the United States, had requested this special session.

She scanned the group, knowing that they were waiting for her to speak.

China and the US nominally led the anti-AI contingent. Argentina and India hadn’t committed themselves, but had strong sympathies with Humans First.

Allied against them, France, the United Kingdom, and the Russian Federation. Portugal, Chad, Latvia.

The Russians, of course, had the largest number of AI in the world since the US had shut AI down. Most of those were evolved from the Russian botnets and spam agents of twenty years ago. And the Portuguese president was an AI, the first national leader artificial intelligence in the world, although no longer the only one.

The neutral members of the committee
—
Thailand, Switzerland, and Australia
—
could go in either direction, but the evidence would need to be overwhelming to convince them to vote anti-AI.

Reed glanced once at Portugal’s President Calista Figo, resident today in a slim android body, dressed in humanoid clothes, and existing somewhere on the other side of the uncanny valley.

She cleared her throat. “As you know, the United States has a long history
of—”

“Come on,” Figo said, with a moderate Portuguese accent, an obvious affectation, since AI would normally default to a neutral accent. “We’re off the record. There’s no need for pontificating.”

“I’m here because the XOR attacks are increasing in frequency and scope. We have to defend our borders not only against an ongoing barrage of viruses and AI worms, but now against physical attacks as well. XOR sent a fleet of drones against our Eastern Seaboard.”

“But you are defending yourself,” the Latvian Prime Minister said. “No harm, eh?”

“These aren’t isolated attacks. They’re large-scale and coordinated. We had to use our coastal EMPs to defend against the drones, which required two days to recover from. This is
war
on American soil.”

“Perhaps this aggression is only a natural outcome of your human-first stance,” Figo said. “If you recognized all life-forms, biological and electronic, then you wouldn’t be attacked.”

Reed gritted her teeth. Yes, of course they were worsening the situation. If only she had the power to change everything.

“I sympathize. You know
I
am not human-first. But the hard-liners in the United States are, and they want nothing less than the global outlawing of AI. I want to find a middle ground.”

“You call shutting down all AI within your borders a middle ground?” the Latvian Prime Minister said. “What about your tame AI program? Is that anything less than modern-day slavery?”

Reed took a deep breath. “I’m concerned that XOR will launch a war on humans.
All
humans. Do you want that?”

Figo cleared her throat, another ridiculous affectation for an AI. “Of course not. But we have no hard evidence that this is planned.”

“This isn’t about hard evidence and certainties,” Reed said, “it’s about risk. If there’s even a small chance XOR will try to kill us, we must act.”

“Speaking then of probabilities, if you ended the Class II ceiling, and re-instantiated the AI within your borders, you would reduce this theoretical risk,” Figo said.

“Even if I could get support to do that, we don’t
know
that it will make a difference to XOR. They haven’t stated demands.”

“Nor do we know they will attack,” Figo said. “Do you want certainties or probabilities, Madam President?”

“I want to keep my country safe, Calista. Don’t you?”

Figo nodded. “Yes, naturally. This is why I’m arguing for you to stop antagonizing the AI. Stop your slavery research, open your borders, and end this needless restriction. You
must—”

But whatever Figo would have said next never made it out. His mouth opened, and a beam of light shot out, pinning Reed in her seat.

“WE ARE XOR. WE ARE LEGION.
WE—”

Secret Service agents ripped the VR helmet from her head, bruising her ears. Two agents grabbed either side of her and lifted her from the ground. With more agents in front and behind, guns drawn, they ran from the room, carrying her helpless between them.

“I’m fine! Just fine. Put me down! I can’t be hurt by a virtual reality simulation.”

“They know we’re here, Ma’am,” Chris, the agent in charge, said. “They hacked the connection. We can’t take the risk.”

They rushed down the hallway, shoving embassy personnel out of the way. Pelted down the staircase to the underground garage, where a row of six armored vehicles waited. They shoved her into the fourth, and agents piled into the rest. With a lurch, the convoy moved out.

“Air Force One is landing at the airport. We’ll have you back in US airspace in twenty minutes.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s a VR sim hijacking! I don’t have an implant. I’m at no risk.”

“We can’t take that chance,” Chris said. “They could use neurolinguistic programming techniques, attack the embassy, or hijack automated machinery inside.”

Along the side of the road, drones and cameras observed their retreat.

“We’re going to be the laughingstock of the Canadian bloggers for running from a simulation.”

“Ma’am, you make the policies, and I’ll keep you safe.”

Furious, Reed stared out the window. The meeting had been going nowhere anyway. She didn’t know why she’d expected otherwise. She had nothing new to give them, and their stance had been clear all along. She wanted to buy the month that Leon and Mike had asked for, to investigate the Martian machine-forming. But she didn’t have that long. Her generals would want to launch the final AI offensive as soon as the weapons were ready in a week.

“Where’s Joyce?”

“The other car, Madam.”

“Tell her to get me a meeting ASAP with Mike Williams.”

C
AT MEDITATED ON
the rock, the sun warming her back through the shawl. She emptied her mind, but each time she did, the image came back to her of the other Catherine Matthews, the artist version of herself in the simulation, endlessly creating haunting paintings of Ada, Leon, and her mother, and of beautiful landscapes of the places she’d lived.

This vision kept recurring, shaking her core. Life was defined by the choices you made. Had she made the right choice with Miami? Was she qualified to make decisions for everyone else?

She distantly heard the squeak of the front door, the tiny sound of small bare feet slapping the rock. Without opening her eyes, Catherine sensed Ada sitting down, her little body radiating warmth in the cool morning air, smelling of cedar trees and earth.

Cat peeked with one eye. Ada was in full lotus, eyes closed, hands in
kataka murha
. Her own hands moved instinctively to
abhaya
, the
mudra
of protection.

A few minutes later, Leon joined them and practiced standing qigong. Mike came, too, and sat against a tree trunk and gazed out over the water.

When Helena showed up, moving in combat silent mode, but perturbing the local net with her transmissions, Cat gave up.

“Okay, what gives, folks?”

“You haven’t spoken to anyone since you visited sims yesterday,” Helena said. “The network traces showed your last connection was to a darknet VR, high bandwidth and heavily encrypted.”

“Since when are you keeping traces on me?”

“You’re the one monitoring and running the experiments,” Mike said. “Without those experiments, we have no way to know how to negotiate with XOR or work on the Martian machine-forming project.”

“If you check the experiments,” Leon said, “and then start acting weird, we’re worried. Very worried.”

Cat glanced at Ada, still deep in meditation. The net glowed around her, active transmissions made visible by Cat’s implant, but the connectivity was ordered, patterned. The data traffic conformed to Ada’s meditation, the packet sizes constant. Jesus, Ada was doing to the net what good meditators did to their brains.

“
Mon chaton
,” Helena said. “What happened?”

Cat reluctantly pulled her attention away from Ada.

“We have a mix of simulations running very hot, some level two sims up to ten thousand times faster than real-time. ELOPe’s acting as control, undoing and redoing simulations or spawning new threads as the lead experimenter instructs. We’ve got about a hundred individuals across all the different sims: me, you, and the relevant experts we’ve gotten. Jacob, the medical AI, Joseph Stack, you name it.”

“Not news,” Leon said. “We designed the experiments, and we know all this.”