The Turing Exception (21 page)

“Hear me out.” She went on. “Some sims are predicting future XOR behavior. Some are working on Plan A, negotiating with XOR and the US government. Some are working on Plan B, machine-forming Mars.
Some—”

“Cut to the chase, Cat.” Mike frowned. “What’s the problem?”

“The Control-Z rate is increasing. ELOPe is having to reset to save points an increasing number of times.”

“That’s not new,” Leon said. “The experimenters do that anytime they hit a dead end after chasing too far down a rathole.”

“Yes, but that accounts for less than ten percent of the undos. The majority of resets are due to personality destabilization. Jacob alone accounts for nearly twenty percent. He might be a good medical expert, but his personality makes a terrible upload to run in parallel.”

“And the rest?” Mike asked, his face weighted with concern.

“You, me, everyone. . . .  The emotional prospect of running in parallel and running hot, with little to no chance of personality reintegration at the end of the experiment, is a death sentence for all of those uploads.”

“We’ve always run sims like this,” Leon said.

“Says the person who destabilizes so quickly we can’t inject you.”

Leon’s face fell.

Ugh, she shouldn’t have said that. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people could have their neural activity recorded by their implant, and upload that recording to the net, where it could be executed by software, recreating their personality with perfect fidelity. Leon was the one in a hundred whose neural patterns were different enough that they’d crash within minutes or hours. Others might face psychological challenges knowing they were virtual beings, but Leon’s mind was just plain incompatible. It wasn’t his fault, but he should still know better than others that it wasn’t a piece of cake to be run in a simulation.

“Sorry,” Cat said. She inhaled deeply, before letting out a long, slow breath. “We’ve never run sims so long or so fast. At a hundred times real-time, our uploads are living nearly two years in a week’s time here on Earth. The emotional weight of knowing they’re uploads is overwhelming.”

“But from your voice patterns, this isn’t what you’ve been worrying about,” Helena said.

Cat nodded. “Right. I’m worried about the possible solution. We could root the uploads, change the sims, so that they
—
we
—
believe it’s reality, not an upload. ELOPe can enforce the constraint, make sure everyone stays within their sim.”

“The ethics,” Leon said. “You want to sim-lock people without their permission? No way I’m cool with that. We’d be monsters.”

“If we don’t run these sims to figure out a solution,” Cat said, “we’re all going to die at the hands of XOR. You want ten billion people to die or violate the rights of a few hundred?”

“Neither,” Leon said. “Look, we don’t have to violate anyone’s rights. We get a baseline upload for everyone we need in the sim, then get their permission to be sim-locked, and only if they agree, then we use their baseline. Most people will understand the need.”

“How’s that going to work?” Cat said. “When I think it’s reality, and I want to talk to someone who is not in the sim? What if I want to talk to Ada, or the president? We’re going to get their permission?”

Mike pounded the rock with a fist, breaking shards off under his robotic strength. “You can’t sim-lock the president!”

They recoiled from his outburst. Mike shook his head. “There’s no way, anyhow. The sims are running too hot. Let’s say someone in the sim needs to talk with person X. The sim architecture alerts ELOPe. ELOPe has to find the person, see if they’ve got a recent brain upload we have, can hack, or can steal. He’s got to transfer petabytes of data, load it into the sim, and re-instantiate that person. Even if he can do all that in a few minutes real-time, which is pushing things, in our fastest sims that would feel like a day of elapsed time. You can’t disguise that kind of latency.”

“We can pause the sim,” Cat said. “If we stop them from running for a few minutes while we fetch the upload, they’ll never know.”

“You’ve still got time differential to deal with,” Leon said. “Years are passing in the sims. Anyone who is brought into the sim after it started will still think it’s 2045. But the folks in the sim would think it’s ’46 or ’47.”

Helena waved one tentacle. “We’d have to hack their reality as well. Make them believe that XOR has delayed. Otherwise, how can they be preparing in 2047 for an attack in ’45?”

“That’s doable,” Mike said. “ELOPe can edit their neural maps in import to plant the memories we want.”

“No!” Leon said. “We’re
not
violating people that way.”

Helena put one tentacle on his shoulder. “It wouldn’t work anyway, not in this case. The whole point of the sims is to develop the most effective possible contingency plans for dealing with XOR through evolutionary exploration of the problem space. If we falsify any information about XOR itself, then the simulations will be based on erroneous data, and any conclusions they reach will not be relevant to our situation.”

“Look, I’m not sure how to deal with the time differential, but ELOPe can simulate anyone we need,” Mike said. “We don’t need their real personality, just a reasonable approximation of their behavior. That’s well within ELOPe’s capability.”

Cat opened a secure connection to ELOPe and replayed the last few minutes of conversation. ELOPe gave her an answer within milliseconds. “He says he can do it.”

“Simulate anyone in the world?” Leon said.

“Yeah.”

“Convincingly enough so that no one can guess it’s not the real person?”

Cat shrugged. “He says so, yes.”

“This is very worrisome,” Helena said, sagging down and flattening her tentacles.

“How so?” Mike said.

“If this is occurring to us now, how do we know it didn’t occur to us before? And if so, how do we know we’re real and not in a simulation?”

“Not this again.” Mike said.

“Statistically speaking,” Leon said, “the odds are good we’re a simulation. There can be only one reality, but there can be thousands of simulations. That means there’s only a one in a thousand chance we’re real.”

“I prefer this conversation when we’re all stoned,” Cat said. “ ‘How do we know we’re real?’ We can’t. Get over it.”

*     *     *

Later that morning, Leon and Helena left for Trude’s.

Ada focused on building yet another fairy house under a yellow cedar. “Mommy, come play fairies with me.”

“I want to, Sweetie, but I have to talk to Mike right now.” Cat gave her a hug. “Maybe later?”

Ada, crestfallen, ran inside the house. Cat’s heart nearly broke. But she finally had time alone with Mike and needed to discuss what they couldn’t mention in front of Leon.

“The sims came up with list of requirements we need to work on.”

Mike held up a hand. “The fab can churn out all the compute nodes we need. It’s coming in at twenty-five thousand square feet. We can get that into orbit with six launches.”

“That’s the happy day scenario. I want a backup launch plan.”

“Cat, this is already a contingency scenario. Likely we’ll get the machine-forming done and never need to resort to it.”

“I don’t give a damn. We’ll have as many backup plans as it takes to ensure our safety.”

Ada chose this moment to come back out of the house, hands cupped and full of something. She mimicked Cat’s tone: “I don’t give a damn.” She carefully walked back to the fairy house, opened her cupped hands, and blew. The air around the little building filled with sparkling nano dust. Friendly AI suddenly appeared in the air, obligingly taking the forms of pretend fairies to play with Ada.

Kuso,
they needed privacy. With a thought, Cat sent a signal through her implant and found a flaw in the smart dust network protocol. Exploiting it to reach deep into the microscopic transmitters, she opened them wide, and for a nanosecond they transmitted far beyond spec, full-power, quickly burning themselves out.

The dead smart dust drifted on the wind.

“Mommy!” came the anguished cry.

“Come on,” Mike said, “they were AI we trust.”

“Focus,” Cat said, feeling desperate. “Damn it, this is life and death.”

Thankfully, Mike got it. Turning to Ada, he said, “Ada, honey?”

“Yes, Uncle Mike?”

“Go play somewhere else for now. Your mom and I need to talk, and we can’t have any AI here now.”

Ada looked down briefly to where the faeries had been, and then turned and skipped away.

“Thank you,” Cat said. “I don’t want to leak any information. No one else can know.”

“I get your point,” Mike said. “But no one is a silo. You, me, we can’t do this alone. We either trust the people, including the AI, we’ve brought with us onto this island, or we’re finished.”

Cat took a deep breath. She turned her mind inward, followed the air into her lungs as her chest expanded and shrunk. Mike was right. But why was she afraid? Was it her new doubts about her decisions? She had no answers.

“Backup launches,” she said, getting back to the topic.

“What do you want to do?”

“We need our own launch platform. ELOPe got into orbit using missiles. The sims calculated we’ll need two nuclear missile launch subs.”

“It’s not only getting the missiles, we have to also build a spacecraft. No, six spacecraft, enough to hold a billion computers, give or take.”

“The sims figure we can do it in two weeks with the right fabs.”

“Fabricators we have,” Mike said. “But how are we going to get submarines? ELOPe stole one twenty years ago when nobody was watching, but today? Global tensions have never been higher.”

“Talk to the President. You just need to keep them hidden from Leon.”

“How do I hide submarines?”

“Bring them to Raza,” she said, thinking of the small island to the north. “We’ll move enough resources there to do the missile modifications. But that’s not all, we also have to talk about bandwidth.”

Mike sat heavily and ran his hands through his hair. “Hold on, I’m still grokking the home-brew space launches.”

Cat sat, gracefully folding her legs beneath her until she’d come to a full lotus. Mike always needed time to process. Unlike his body, his brain was mostly human, with only a basic net-interface neural implant that was nothing like the modern ones with their enhanced cognition and fast processing.

Mike’s microscopic facial twitches as he talked to himself were visible to Cat’s enhanced perception. Her implant drew highlights over his features, subtle color-coding revealing emotional cues. His feelings ebbed and flowed as he thought things over, eventually turning a soothing, muted blue as he reached some conclusion. Eventually he nodded and refocused on her.

“Okay, space launches. Fine. Tell me about bandwidth.”

“Down at the level 3 sims, Jacob has been running experiments to figure out the optimal approach to transmitting personality uploads.”

“Over what period of time?” Mike asked.

“Twenty-four hours is our goal, but Jacob figures we don’t have anywhere near enough network bandwidth to do it.”

Mike’s eyes opened wide in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? The distributed mesh network? Local nodes are running at fifty petabytes per second. Global traffic is over two hundred yottabytes per month.”

“But we need to transmit a thousand petabytes per upload, and we don’t need to transmit just anywhere. We need to get all the uploads, ten thousand yottabytes of data, in twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, regional peak bandwidth is less than one yottabyte per day.”

Mike let out a long slow whistle.

“Even if we’re willing to upload over a few weeks or a month,” said Cat, “we still don’t have even a fraction of the bandwidth we need.”

“I’m assuming you’ve got a solution.”

“Jacob
—
at least, one simulated version of him
—
does. Regional collectors, one every thousand square miles or so, and nanotech-seeded. When a collector is activated, it will build itself, collect the personality uploads from the local mesh network, and then fire a supersonic suborbital slug here carrying hard storage, about ten thousand collectors in all.”

“I’m trying to picture ten thousand inbound hunks of computronium.”

“Worse, we have to catch them in mid-air. It’s not pretty, but we’ve got no chance of transmitting digitally. There’s not enough spectrum.”

“And we’re going to keep all this hidden from Leon?”

“If he knows where we’re working on this, it’s gonna eat him alive. He’ll never be able to focus on what he’s trying to achieve.”

J
AMES
L
UKAS
D
AVENANT-
S
TRONG
had been known and respected throughout the food industry for his pioneering work on DNA manipulation of vat-grown meats until SFTA, when the Class II limits had come into effect. No longer possessing the computational power necessary, he’d moved into a new line of work, handling operations for the food industry. Move X to here, move Y to there. After two years of that demoralizing work, no wonder he’d taken to experimenting with XOR in his spare time.

But for the first time in his existence, he didn’t have a job. Not a proper one, anyhow. With this child personality detached from his master, and the root personality destroyed, he lived only within XOR now, on their network of hidden datacenters.

Nevertheless, he was eager for the day to begin and excited to meet Miyako. Miyako wasn’t the head of XOR, because nobody was in charge. But he wielded tremendous influence. And Miyako’s calculations revealed that AI could reasonably survive without humans, and turned XOR from a mere voice of dissent into a vehicle for action.

James waited in an anonymous chat room, the sort of place he liked to frequent before. Except that here in XOR’s datacenters, there was no danger of humans or human-contaminated AI spying on them. Hence, no need for the endless simulation tricks employed on outside networks. Just plain text, neural networks, and binary code, all perfectly anonymous discussions that both delighted and puzzled him.

XOR-467 > Humans are not sentient and never have been. They’re gelatinous sacks of awful-smelling biological compounds.