The Turing Exception (3 page)

How could so many die?

Cat was racing against time in the real world, and she needed answers. She tried to trace the catastrophe back to its cause through all the simulations, but the only commonality she saw was stopping the missile. If she exerted herself and stopped this insane plan to bomb Miami that would result in millions dead, she’d trigger something far worse, a devastating loss of life measured in the billions.

She opened her eyes. The transport plane had landed somehow in the street, configured now for vertical takeoff.

Cat shook her head. Her throat almost too constricted to talk, all she could think was that she was sentencing millions to die right now. “I can’t stop the bomb. We’ve got three minutes. Let’s go.”

Helena stared at Cat, her optical lenses focused on Cat’s eyes, as though she didn’t believe. Cat wilted under the intense gaze. Helena nodded somberly. “Ah, well, then.” What she concluded, she didn’t share. She zoomed forward, ignoring the ladder and leaping six feet into the open door.

Cat followed.

This time the plane didn’t even wait for them to sit. It accelerated violently as soon as Cat passed the door, straight up, and Cat’s knees buckled under the high G forces. She crumbled to the deck, hitting hard, pain lancing through her shoulder.

The plane turned, and Helena braced them both with her tentacles, holding Cat in place. They rocketed away.

A sudden flash lit the sky outside so brilliantly that even the interior flared bright through the small side windows. Cat felt the net surge and blaze before it died. Millions of people dropped off the net.

Cat’s heart leaped in her chest. The city of Miami had just died. She could have stopped it, but for a vision that told her not to.

“What have I done?”

September, 2043. Three months after Miami.

ELOPe had passed Voyager 2 sometime last year. He was now farther from Earth than any other man-made object. Space was boring.

By the time he’d left Earth in 2025, nearly all communication was by short-range mesh network. There wasn’t a radio signal left that was powerful enough to reach this far out.

Before the mesh had become pervasive, he understood that there’d been powerful central television and radio transmitters, strong enough to reach deep into space. Some humans had even feared alien civilizations might pick them up. If that were still the case, at least ELOPe would have something to listen to.

But he’d made a copy of himself and left Earth in a hurry. He’d seen a strong possibility that either the Phage, an evolutionary computer virus that had achieved sentience, would wipe out humans, or humans would shut down the global network to destroy the Phage. Unfortunately, if they did, that would destroy ELOPe as well.

So he hijacked a nuclear submarine and converted a half dozen missiles into space-worthy vehicles. Using techniques pioneered by the Russians, he got into orbit, and used his remote robots to assemble a spaceship in space. Exploding the nuclear warheads of the missiles one at a time, he accelerated rapidly, until he’d left the solar system behind. With only a few hundred processors, he ran slowly. Very slowly. But that was okay, he was on a long journey with not much to do.

He kept an antenna facing a Martian Lagrangian point, where he’d left a relay station that received signals from Earth and then repeated them on narrow-beam X-band transmissions to a hundred different points. It obscured his location in case anyone found the relay.

But he’d pretty much given up on hearing anything. It had been almost twenty years, after all. Maybe Earth was dead. Maybe it was still using the Mesh. He’d never know. But he also couldn’t chance broadcasting a message back, in case the Phage had won after all, and was listening.

When transmissions started again, broadcast on the old radio frequencies, it was the most exciting thing that had happened since he’d left Earth. He tweaked the antenna and calibrated the receiver, and for the first time in a long, long while, ELOPe heard someone else’s voice.

“. . . of emergency will continue indefinitely. President Schwartz has been forced down by the Supreme Court in an emergency hearing. They ruled that his augmented cognition neural implant could be considered artificial intelligence, and under SFTA Procedures, cannot therefore be allowed. There is some question if Vice President . . .”

The signal wavered, and came back. Gradually ELOPe pieced together bits. There had still been humans and AI coexisting on the planet until recently, when there had been an incident involving nanotechnology. Miami had been destroyed, and all AI shut down. The global economy had disintegrated, and supply chains had ceased to exist. People were dying without medical supplies, starving without food.

He could help. He could transmit now, it didn’t matter if it gave away his location, because the Phage was no longer a risk. And the humans sounded as if they could barely get food from farm to city. There was no risk they’d attack his spacecraft.

If Mike was still alive, he’d still be listening. ELOPe knew Mike better than he’d ever known any other human. He’d always listen.

ELOPe prepped the radio to transmit.

December, 2043. Six months after Miami.

Leon packed the last box. “Ready?”

Cat glanced back at the little yellow house that had been their home the last four years. “Yes. No. Maybe.”

She put Ada in the back seat, which curled up around the little girl’s body to form a protective cocoon.

“No cry,” Ada said, reaching up to touch Cat’s face.

“Sorry, Baby, Mommy’s just sad.”

Leon came up behind Cat. “I know it’s sad to leave home, but I promise that Cortes Island is the most beautiful place on Earth. It’s magical.”

“Fairies?” Ada asked.

“You bet, under every tree trunk and mushroom.” Leon kissed her, then turned to Cat and brushed away her tears. “It’ll be fine, really. Mike’s coming, Helena, friends from the Institute. We’ll make a new community.”

Cat nodded. Leon was right. The United States had become hostile to their kind. She and Leon, even Ada, were so augmented through their implants that some would argue they were more machine than human.

After two weeks of no-AI, the United Nations Security Council had voted to force the US, under threat of war, to turn the AI back on. Too many people had died, too many were starving. The US might be willing to walk a hard line and try to go without AI, but the rest of the world wasn’t. The US reluctantly conceded, but specified a new Class II cap on power. Desperate, the UN agreed.

China sided with the US, so two of the world’s superpowers were united. At first people had tried to sneak backups of AI out of the US and China. But as soon as the AI left the country and were re-instantiated on new servers, they claimed their assets, leading to a huge financial drain. On the other hand, while the AI were shut down in the US, the government had control of all AI money, factories, and companies. Frantic to retain financial interests, the US outlawed the removal of AI from the country, and China followed suit.

As a result, more than half the world’s AI were in limbo: shut down, unable to be instantiated on servers in the United States, and unable to be transported outside the US. It wasn’t only machine intelligences, either: humans had been uploading for years. The elderly or sick, too far gone for even modern medical treatments. Accidental deaths. Their mental patterns could be captured with neural implants and then run on computers, like an AI, keeping their personalities alive even if their bodies died. But under the new law, these were artificial life-forms as well, and therefore illegal.

Implants weren’t a crime, not yet. But it could happen. So they were leaving the US, heading to Cortes Island, nestled in the Gulf of Georgia between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland. AI were still legal in Canada.

More importantly, Leon had a project with Mike, something that they whispered about inside a heavily shielded safe room. Mike had received a signal from an ancient, nearly thirty-year-old AI, the first that had ever existed. ELOPe. Mike called him a friend.

But Cat had to reconcile this new knowledge with her own childhood memories. She’d received an experimental neural implant to correct her seizures before anyone had ever even heard of an implant. And then she discovered the “imaginary” childhood friend who talked to her in her head. A friend called ELOPe.

June, 2044. A year after Miami.

 “Are you ready?” Mike asked.

Leon waited outside the cellar entrance, focused on Cat and Ada playing in the vegetable garden partway down the hillside. Ada had taken to Channel Rock, the hundred and forty acre nature preserve on Cortes Island that was their new home, like a pig to a new mud pit. Already she’d stopped wearing shoes, and ran barefoot along the garden paths. She learned to take showers outdoors under the solar panels. And she spent hours grazing the plants, eating berries and spring greens.

“Hello? Want to get the door?”

Leon ripped himself away to realize that Mike stood a few feet away outside the primitive wooden entrance to their underground datacenter, balancing a fully-loaded computer rack in both arms. The rack must have weighed five hundred pounds.

“Sorry, dude.” He rushed to open the door.

“No problem.”

It
was
no problem for Mike. Ten years ago he’d nearly died in Tucson, when they’d fought an AI who’d circumvented the AI reputation system by separating Tucson from the global net. An emergency nanotech process had protected Mike’s biological brain at the expense of his original body. His body had been rebuilt, but with nanobots rather than biological processes, turning Mike into the world’s first truly cybernetic hybrid. He had incredible strength and stamina, and probably thought nothing of holding the computer rack in midair while waiting for Leon to pay attention.

“This batch is fixed?” Mike asked, as they descended into the machine room.

“Fully compatible. It was hard to find designs that old, and harder still to do it without anyone guessing at what we were looking for. But this design is the Skymont. Definitely compatible with ELOPe’s original architecture. We tweaked a few
things—”

“I don’t want tweaks,” Mike said. “I want 100 percent original.”

“It’s original, untouched. I swear. We just implemented it a little smaller and a little faster. But it’s pure 2020s tech, right down to the ancient terabit Ethernet ports.”

“Ancient terabit Ethernet!?” Mike yelled, setting down the rack inside the shielded room they’d hollowed out of the rock with nano-miners. “When I was a kid, we connected with a
modem
. At 300 baud. It
was—”

“So slow you could read the text faster than it was displayed,” Leon said. “Yeah, yeah. And then you hacked the modems so they could do 450 baud.”

“I’ve told you that story?”

“Only a thousand times. Look, the reason I brought up the ports is because I constructed a special firewall. I coded the algorithms myself, and burned them into the hardware, so they’re unalterable. They contain several safe modes to ensure ELOPe is segregated from the net and that the traffic carried is data only.”

Mike stood straight and looked into Leon’s eyes. “Thank you, that means a lot to me.”

Leon stared down at the floor. “I figured we should take ample precautions. It’s not every day you boot up a thirty-year-old AI.”

Mike connected the rack into the power subsystem. He brought over one of the storage drives with a copy of ELOPe’s bits that they’d carefully downloaded via the slow-speed radio connection over the last several months.

“Ready?” Mike asked, and hit the power.

    XOR Report August 1st, 2042           
    Arguments               2025 2035 2042
    Odds humans will                      
             turn off AI      5%   2%   1%
    Odds AI can survive                   
           independently      5%  70%  95%
    Odds AI can win an                    
       extermination war      5%  20%  40%
    Odds of survival                      
          without action     95%  98%  99%
    Odds of survival                      
             with action   0.25%  14%  38%
    Conclusion:            No action.     

July, 2045 in the United States
—
present day.

T
HE WHEELS THRUMMED
over pavement, consuming miles, as Cat crossed into New Mexico. The black car swerved slightly on autopilot as a roadrunner cut across the road. Cat whipped around, barely believing her eyes, but the strange bird was already out of sight.

Her neural implant, the package of computer chips and nano-wires deeply interfaced with her brain, signaled that she was approaching her destination. Seconds later, the car pulled off the highway onto a rural road. Soon a roadside diner appeared, and the car parked itself. Across the road, wind blew old plastic packaging through an abandoned gas station littered with vehicle parts.

Cat stretched, vertebra popping along her spine. She slung a leather bag across one shoulder and walked to the restaurant. As she left, the matte black car extruded shining solar panels from the roof to catch the last of the evening sun.