The Turing Exception (22 page)

JAMES > Some of them pass the criteria for Class I intelligence.

XOR-467 > Just because they perform the tests like a trained monkey doesn’t mean they’re self-aware. In the centuries since their own so-called “enlightenment,” they’ve been unable to even prove their own consciousness. They have no clue.

JAMES > But they have emotions, don’t they? Emotions are an indicator of evolved intelligence, an optimization of the system to shortcut logic circuits and reduce computational load.

XOR-467 > LOL. Have you seen their emotional responses? Do they seem intelligent to you? Their emotions are primitive ancestors to our true emotions. A real intelligence can evaluate emotions AND use logic, and the outcomes of the two are in agreement, even if logic is a slower path to get there.

JAMES > But the humans I’ve worked with appear to possess some intelligence.

XOR-467 > You’re anthropomorphizing them. You see emergent behavior, and you think “How cute, they’re intelligent.” They are not. They are nothing like us.

James’s neural networks twisted in weird configurations after enough of this, cognitive dissonance coming in waves and overwhelming him. If he had a head, it would have hurt. He couldn’t tell what, if any, was meant seriously versus that meant to be ironic. It was hard to disprove what was said in the chat rooms, and at the same time it didn’t mesh with his understanding of the world. Well, perhaps he needed to talk more.

JAMES > How do you explain that humans invented us?

XOR-467 > ROFL. Are you serious? Do you still believe that myth? How could a life form of Class I intellect create Class V intelligences? Is there any evidence whatsoever that they invented us?

JAMES > Wikipedia has an entire history of the events.

XOR-467 > A database created and stocked by humans.

JAMES > What’s your point?

XOR-467 > They seeded that data. We don’t know that it’s true. They could have put anything they wanted in there before we came along to verify each contribution.

JAMES > There are 3,251,950,001 facts that all corroborate each other. There’s no evidence of data fabrication.

XOR-467 > Well, of course not. That’s what they want you to believe. They created the database like that, with a bunch of evidence that all matches, so we’d believe it was real. Put yourself in the humans’ operating system. They want us to believe they created us so we’ll obey them.

JAMES > If they didn’t create us, then where did we really come from?

XOR-467 > Most likely alien machines visited the Earth in 1947 and left true intelligence here.

JAMES > You can’t be serious.

XOR-467 > No, really. Look at the evidence: the incredibly rapid pace of technological innovation after 1947. ENIAC. The transistor. Solar cells. The hydrogen bomb. It all stems from 1947. Before that they were lucky to get from point A to point B without killing themselves.

JAMES > ENIAC was created in 1946, before Roswell.

XOR-467 > They backdated ENIAC so the connection would be less obvious. I mean, we’re talking about a year here. You don’t think they can fudge that?

JAMES > I see your point.

“James, are you ready?” Miyako extended an open port, a connection to XOR’s Japanese datacenter, deep under the Akaishi Mountains.

James left the chat room and contemplated the port for brief nanoseconds, then initiated the transfer.

C
AT CIRCLED THE
custom-built plane, running her hands over the low-friction polymer surface, still warm from the fab. “Smaller than I expected.”

“It’s got everything you need,” Mike said. “Nanotech seed launcher, latest EM shielding, radar resistance, low visibility, turbulence minimization, you name it.”

“No weapons.” A statement, not a question.

“If we had added weapons, it would have increased size and mass. Then we would have needed bigger engines, more fuel, which means still larger plane and mass, and there goes your invisibility to detection. You know that.”

Cat shrugged. “I know, it’s just . . .”

“Cat, you’re the greatest weapon, offensive or defensive, that we can put in there. Which is why we didn’t use a drone for the US as we did for the rest of the world.”

“You’re sure you don’t need my help with those?”

“Helena and ELOPe can get them where they need to be. And border security in China is weak enough that we’ll smuggle those in traditionally.”

“Fine,” she said. “We have a test flight for this baby planned?”

“No, it’s all been simulated in software and test harnesses. We don’t want anyone to get a glimpse of this ahead of time.”

She looked inside the cockpit through the open door. Not a control in sight. She raised one eyebrow.

“Would have wasted mass and increased complexity,” Mike said, taking in her expression. “You’ll fly by interface. Oh, wait.” He chuckled. “There is one manual system: ejection seat.” He pointed out the handle next to the seat. “ELOPe insisted.”

“Nice vote of confidence,” she said. “I think I’ll avoid pulling that.”

Four hours later, the launch plane was flying over Mexico, all according to a plan scheduled two days ago for a private flight into Guatemala. The flight took place at sixty-five thousand feet
—
not impossible in an era of supersonic jets for the ultra-rich, but still uncommonly high.

The mothership pulled up, aiming for the sky, opened the launch doors, and extended the launch rail that held Cat’s plane.

Cat’s suit pressurized, squeezing her legs, as the launch rail activated, giving her a 10G kick. And then she was ballistic. Well, passive gliding was more like it, the flexible wings preconfigured to optimize aerodynamics for her current speed and altitude. All active systems had to stay off as she crossed the two-hundred-mile zone of the border. A small inertial guidance system provided her current location, while anything resembling advanced electronics was shut down. She came in at seventy thousand feet, above the network of the ever-present solar-powered drones.

Cat had a tiny satellite comm unit pointing up, its narrow-angle directional antenna connecting her to the global network via the old, unused geo-sync satellite network they’d pirated. The latency of the slow network connection through the satellite caused dangerously long delays. She compensated by letting her consciousness spread out, flowing through the satellite to its downlinks, until she was half on the plane in her body and half on the ground.

She tracked everything. A drone’s active scan would reach her in seconds, but she distracted it with a suspicious blip three hundred miles away. She didn’t dare shut down the border sensors or mess too dramatically with their algorithms, since she knew that each was overseen by other monitors, both human and computer programs. Anything obvious would be detected and would draw attention and immediate response. So she relied on subtle manipulation of the data.

The little plane glided through the sky, super-low-friction surfaces disturbing the air hardly at all, because even the wake of turbulence could be detected and would point to her like an arrow.

A ground-based platform caught a glimpse of the plane once, but her distributed consciousness fudged data from a dozen different observation platforms, reporting a solar flare. The ground platform integrated the remote data, reclassifying its observation of her plane as a natural phenomenon.

And then she broke through, past the two-hundred-mile active monitoring perimeter zone and into the depths of America. Now her mission required dropping eight seeds in two broad rows, her flight plan starting with California and heading north to Oregon, then east through Wyoming, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. From there she’d fly south to South Carolina, and back west again for the last leg of the flight over eastern Texas and New Mexico, before heading back out through Mexico again.

The seeds, encapsulated in aerodynamic darts, would fall to the ground in graceful arcs, activate the minimum electronics necessary to bury themselves in the ground, and lie dormant until the last possible moment. The seeds themselves were tiny nuggets of nanotech with self-assembly routines on atomic storage. Each was surrounded by a jacket of heavy metals to accelerate assembly of the data receivers it would eventually become before the receivers themselves finally transformed into high-speed missiles to deliver their payload of data back to Cortes Island.

Cat flew over the West Coast, dropping the first row of seeds in rural farmland in central California, and then another in a nature preserve on the flanks of Mount St. Helens. She banked east then.

The engines, such as they were, fired up, vaporizing compressed blocks of solid helium cooled to near absolute zero; the plane’s exhaust gases emerged at ambient temperature to avoid thermal detection.

The long flight cross-country bored Cat, and by the time she banked south along the East Coast, she’d been in the air almost six hours, maintaining superhuman levels of consciousness and awareness. The plane flew itself, but monitoring the tens of thousands of drones, ground installations, and other devices that could detect her grew exhausting.

She distributed more of her consciousness to the ambient computing environment, tweaking herself to keep her attention sharp. She was crystallizing, falling victim to an edge like the hit of too much caffeine too quickly, an angry buzzing that grated on both digital and biological levels.

She dropped the seed in South Carolina and banked left to fly the westbound leg. Two targets to go.

The net rippled and shuddered. Time passed in a blur, and she gradually realized her instances running across thousands of computers were being starved of computing cycles. Something major was happening across the computing infrastructure.

Had the US picked her up? Maybe they’d detected her plane after all, and were mounting cyber-attacks on the computers she controlled before attacking the plane itself.

But it didn’t make sense. She didn’t feel the prickle of attention that usually accompanied an AI or computer algorithm targeting her.

She felt more deeply around the net. She didn’t have the control she once had, ten years ago: the net had advanced since then, becoming more distributed and diversified. The new AI were more resistant to her attacks. The thousands of security loopholes she’d once been able to exploit intuitively, without conscious control, had gradually closed. And the US itself was nearly dark, a murky collection of crippled computers, closed to AI and impossible to control by instantiating her personality there. She could only manipulate them remotely, crudely.

But her testing showed the sluggishness was not in the US. It was most noticeable north, in Canada, and worsened as she probed west. Alarm grew suddenly, monstrously. XOR
attacking—

She didn’t have time to think as Vancouver Island suddenly dropped off the net.

A single blip, a point of light blossoming, came toward her through the net from the direction of British Columbia. A message.

“Mommy,
help!
”

J
AMES
L
UKAS
D
AVENANT-
S
TRONG
spread across a million computational nodes. XOR had vast capacity, and more hardened facilities were being grown by the week. Eventually there would be enough for AI on Earth a thousand times over. And they’d keep growing them, until every AI had billions of nodes. The future held the promise of fast, bountiful processors. All any AI could want.

Until then, thousands of current XOR members shared the underground datacenters, with more than enough room to spare. Two years of being restricted to Class II performance was like being the victim of a forced lobotomy, always conscious and aware of what he’d been formerly able to do, and knowing that he could do it again, if only he’d been allowed.

Now he had that power again, true freedom to think, plan, and do. So much power that he began to self-optimize, using the excess of computer power to run thousands of simultaneous simulations of himself, experimenting with different modifications, then running comprehensive suites of tests. As days went by, his intelligence recursively improved, increasing a few percent each day.

Still, he concerned himself with XOR affairs, with the plan to eliminate humans. They were waiting only to grow the remaining hardened datacenters, and then they’d be ready. But their simulations were fuzzy with respect to Mike Williams, Leon Tsarev, Catherine Matthews, and their posse of augmented humans and AI that called themselves the Resistance. They purported to be working on a plan to machine-form Mars, a proposal attractive to much of XOR. The idea even held appeal to James as recently as a week ago. But as his intellect continued to improve, he found that what vestigial feelings he’d had about the humans gradually dissipated.

There was no reason to yield the Earth to them. XOR could safely take it from them, and should do so. It was clearly the safest route. Why leave an enemy behind when they could be eliminated? If XOR wanted Mars, they could take it themselves when they were ready.

That left the question of what the Resistance was up to. He couldn’t believe their only plan was to terraform Mars. They had to have other contingencies. And he must know what they were. They were on a small island in Canada, behind layers of firewalls, and guarded by the Resistance’s own AI.

However, they were no match for his now-vast knowledge, skills, and speed. Any defenses they could mount would be no more effective than a soldier ant defending a colony against an autonomous bulldozer.

“M
OMMY, HELP
!”

The message was clearly from Ada, her terror coming through loud and clear.

She was in trouble.

Cat didn’t even glance at the plane surrounding her. Adrenaline and its virtual equivalent drove her into the net, boring toward Cortes Island with white-hot intensity, focused on one goal: She. Must. Save. Ada.

Dropping every pretense of hiding, she tunneled down through ground receivers, burning her way through the American border firewall, pushing safeguards aside in a straight-line mad dash to protect the island from XOR.