Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5) Page 13

  Terri gave her a smirk. ‘Since big guns actually qualifies as recreation for you, that’s allowable.’

  ~~~

  Whittaker Whitwallace was the same tall, gangling man in a counterpressure suit and tatty lab coat he had been when Fox had last seen him. There were rumours that his thin limbs had had trouble keeping him off the ground even before he had spent years living at one-sixth gravity and he certainly returned to Earth as rarely as possible. Then again, his passion was building weaponry with an affair on the side with defence mechanisms of various sorts, and Jenner was the best place in the solar system for that.

  That said, his ability to keep Fox entertained was limited at the moment. ‘Uh, well, we are working, uh, of course,’ Whitwallace said, ‘but, uh, we have nothing really, uh, new in development at the moment.’

  Fox sagged a little. ‘Aww, I may have to go lie down and rest or something, Whitwallace. You’ve got nothing?’

  ‘Uh, nothing really new.’ Turning, he picked a pistol from his bench and then held it out to her. Fox took it, turning it over in her hand. It looked a lot like a fairly standard automatic pistol with a vented, ten-mil barrel and a built-in tactical light, black frame, and blue steel slider. ‘That is the, uh, production version of the micromissile pistol Mister Martins built for you. We are completing the product verification.’

  ‘It’s sleeker than the prototypes. Any idea when it’ll be ready? We’ve shipped some copies of mine to some of my staff, but switching to the production version would be good.’

  ‘Another month or two. Uh, the unique feature on these is the grip. We have started using the materials Yliaster can produce in some of our products.’

  Fox lifted the unloaded weapon, aiming it at a wall anyway. The grip shifted a little under her hand, settling against her palm as she applied pressure, to fit her hand perfectly. ‘One of those dynamic plastics?’

  ‘Indeed. It adapts to the user’s hand, ensuring a firm grip and optimal performance. It, uh, makes the weapon easier to fire.’ Fox nodded and handed the pistol back. ‘The guidance system in the, uh, ammunition gave us some pointers too. The grenade launchers in the new assault rifles will be able to launch multi-mode, guided munitions.’

  ‘Multi-mode? You squished anti-radiation and visual homing systems down to twenty-five millimetres?’

  ‘With, uh, Mister Martins’ innovations, it was a relatively simple task.’

  ‘For you maybe.’

  ‘Well, yes. Uh, we do have one quite exciting weapon in testing, but unfortunately you can’t fire it.’

  Fox pouted. ‘Why not?’

  ‘No trigger. It is a cyberframe, Miss Meridian, a combat android.’

  ~~~

  Terri appeared in the weapons department as Fox and Whitwallace were walking through into the area they were using to test the new android. She had a peculiarly interested look on her face which Fox could not quite interpret, but suspected was based around observation of Fox’s reaction.

  That seemed a little odd since there was nothing amazingly new about the robot Fox saw when she entered the chamber. There was an unskinned, metal skeleton, humanoid in shape and it would be classed as an android primarily because it lacked the primary features which most people used to define a gynoid, and the unisex models usually got classified using the male name. It was more compact than many Fox had seen, being not much more bulky than a human, but right now it was immobile and hooked up to some sort of diagnostic system by a lot of cables.

  There were several people peering at screens and making notes on tablets, and generally looking industrious. Fox might have suspected they were on a coffee break before Whitwallace entered, except that there was another man in the room who looked like he might have kept them honest. Fox was a little confused about his presence, however: he was a fairly large man, over six feet and heavily muscled, and dressed in military fatigues. Well, a green T-shirt and camouflage pants. The T-shirt was stretched over the man’s chest like a second skin, which was interesting enough, but Fox had not been told the military had anyone at Jenner Station.

  ‘What do you think?’ Terri asked, still wearing that odd smile.

  ‘Well, it’s quite compact,’ Fox said, turning her attention to the frame again. ‘New alloy?’

  ‘It is, actually,’ Whitwallace replied.

  ‘Looks like there’s some new artificial musculature there too. That looks new. Um… I’m not seeing anything really new here. What does the military think?’ Fox looked around at the soldier. He turned his head to look at her, but said nothing. ‘Strong, silent type. Right.’

  ‘He would be,’ Terri said. ‘We haven’t got his AI ready yet.’

  ‘You w– That is an android?’

  ‘That is a cyberframe, the same kind as the other one, with a new artificial skin we developed using an Yliaster variant. I don’t tend to think of them as an android unless they have at least a class three AI. He’s loaded with a class two which really isn’t using the computing power that’s jammed in there.’

  ‘You built a terminator? Did Hollywood tell you nothing?!’

  ‘Hollywood’s a desert,’ Terri pointed out. ‘We think an, um, infiltration model, don’t say anything, might be useful in a number of fields besides invading the strongholds of the last humans alive and slaughtering them with a plasma rifle.’

  ‘Right…’ Fox looked at Whitwallace. ‘You don’t happen to be working on–’

  ‘Plasma weapons are technically impossible,’ the engineer replied. ‘Uh, unless you want them to operate as melee weapons. Containing the plasma would need a, uh, force field or something.’

  ‘Well damn. I really looked forward to walking into a shop and asking for a phased plasma rifle in the forty-watt range. Even though that sounds like a really low power for an energy weapon.’

  ‘We’ll make a scientist of you yet,’ Terri commented wryly.

  Fox walked over to the man – it was hard to think of him as a machine – and stroked a hand over his skin. He did not seem to object, or react. ‘This is… skin,’ Fox said.

  ‘Kind of,’ Terri said.

  ‘A combination of engineered skin cells and nanomachines,’ Whitwallace explained. ‘A modified Yliaster machine produces it. Uh, lays it directly onto the chassis.’

  ‘We can reskin your arm with it at some point,’ Terri suggested. ‘I’d prefer the process was fully mature first, but we can engineer cells based on your skin. It should mesh in perfectly.’

  ‘That’s something to look forward to,’ Fox said. ‘Assuming our machine overlords let you do it, obviously.’

  ‘Oh, obviously.’

  24th January.

  ‘Just so we’re clear, you dragged us out of important work, to the back side of the Moon, to look at a tank of blue water?’ The tank in question was about five feet in height and maybe three in diameter. It did indeed appear to be full of blue liquid, but perhaps not water. Fox was scowling at it.

  ‘Looks can be deceiving,’ Terri replied. ‘That’s possibly the most dangerous, certainly the most contentious, tank of anything I’ve ever had anything to do with. I’d go so far as to say it might be the most contentious thing MarTech has ever made.’

  ‘Huh. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’

  ‘What does it do?’ Jarvis asked. ‘Aside from being a pretty cool Christmas ornament, or maybe a retro lounge decoration. I mean, the sparkle is nice, but…’

  ‘Physically,’ Terri said, ‘it’s a computer built on the same basic principles as the Yliaster swarms.’

  ‘There’s a swarm of nanoscale computers in there,’ Fox said.

  ‘Yeah, suspended in coolant. There’s a lot of quantum-scale effects we have to mitigate, and we need to provide power through induction. The processors communicate internally through light transmissions tuned to propagate well through this medium. That’s why it sparkles so much, by the way. There are lots of tiny machines flashing lights at each other.’

  ‘So what makes
it different from Yliaster? Which is not without its contentious aspects, I might add.’

  ‘The machines in Yliaster run very simple software. They know how to assemble things, and the control computer pulses out a set of instructions for them to follow, and then they start working. They talk to each other to get the job done, but they’re dumb. Simple machines doing simple jobs. FEI is more complex.’

  ‘FEI?’

  ‘I’ll get to that. You remember I had this idea of building an AI using lots of simple AIs talking to each other to make something that was better than the current model, more scalable?’

  ‘I remember something about that. I seem to remember being a little scared of it. But you were talking about using Jackson’s mega-cluster.’

  ‘We decided to try something slightly different. We started off with a couple of thousand nanoprocessors and a fairly simple learning program which mimicked a dozen or so neurons on each machine. We set them going and fed in stimuli of various sorts, and just left them.’

  Kit had appeared beside Fox while Terri talked, staring into the tank with interest. ‘You have added more processors since then?’

  ‘We’ve got activity monitors. Whenever it seemed like activity was flatlining or dropping off, we added another few hundred machines. It was pretty slow at first. There was a lot of activity, but I think the system was just soaking up whatever we tossed at it and not really making much of it.’

  ‘How long ago did this start?’ Fox asked.

  ‘June last year. About six months.’

  ‘How many processors?’ Kit asked.

  ‘It’s up to a billion, emulating around sixteen billion neurons.’

  ‘The human brain averages between nineteen and twenty-three billion.’

  ‘Yeah. We changed the inputs last month and began feeding it a self-describing language sequence developed for communicating with aliens. We’d been seeing some signs of metacognition in the activity sequences and we wondered if it could work it out.’

  Fox shivered. ‘I’m going to assume it could.’

  ‘We got our first reply sequence on the thirteenth. That’s why I got up here as fast as I could.’

  ‘I’m still trying to get my head around this,’ Jarvis said, frowning at the tank. ‘What’s metacognition?’

  ‘Thinking about thinking,’ Kit replied quickly and with a rather excited edge to her voice. ‘It is considered by many to be a primary attribute of sapience.’

  ‘Right. And you communicate with this thing like it was from Alpha Centauri?’

  ‘We didn’t give it a language,’ Terri said. ‘Well, it had a minimal binary language it used to communicate within the cluster and the ability to expand that language. It expanded it. We haven’t managed to decipher much of how it talks to itself, so we had to use something which would give us a common-ground language. Just like we would have to do if the residents of Alpha Centauri popped in for a visit.’

  ‘How bright is it?’ Fox asked, her voice flat.

  ‘That’s a tough one. It’s operating at about the level of a six-year-old, but it’s pretty variable. It’s amazing at logic problems. Feed one in, there’s a flurry of activity, and then the answer comes back. It doesn’t seem so good at math, but… I think it doesn’t like doing math problems.’

  ‘It doesn’t like doing them?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s been getting a bit slower at logic and I think all the number sequences right at the start of the language-learning sequence got it bored with numbers. It keeps blipping out requests that seem to suggest it wants to know about us. I’ve got it learning some protocols that should let us share images and sound with the promise that it’ll make learning easier.’

  ‘A six-year-old is learning networking protocols?’ Jarvis asked.

  ‘Network protocols are just sets of logical rules and it’s good with logic. We aren’t worrying over cryptography, though I figure it could probably handle it. It’s a bit trial and error, but it’s getting close to being able to handle audiovisual feeds.’

  Fox’s expression had turned very serious and when she spoke, her voice was quiet and disquieted. ‘What does FEI mean, Terri?’

  ‘Fractal Emergent Intelligence.’

  ‘It’s fascinating,’ Kit said.

  ‘It’s got the potential for being the most dangerous piece of technology ever developed,’ Fox said. ‘If the media hears about this in an uncontrolled manner…’

  ‘And that’s why we’re here, right?’ Jarvis said. ‘I’d have thought some memetics people would be a good idea, but you want us to consider the potential problems.’

  ‘Actually,’ Terri said, ‘I’m sort of hoping you can put a cap on the list. I’ve been thinking about it for over a month and I’ve got a really long list of things that could go horribly wrong.’

  ‘I’m not going to be that much help then,’ Fox said. ‘Emergent intelligences scare the crap out of me, and that’s the ones that don’t have the capacity for near-infinite expansion of what’s emerged.’

  ~~~

  ‘You’re talking about a potential singularity situation?’ Jarvis asked.

  They had retired to a meeting room, with coffee. The coffee was making Fox feel better, but there was still an undercurrent of worry that refused to stop swirling around in the pit of her stomach. ‘I’m talking about a potential paradigm shift in human society with the possibility of the species becoming obsolete. So… yeah.’

  ‘It won’t be quick,’ Terri said. ‘I mean… At the moment, it really doesn’t know much. It could take years to educate it enough that it’s up to the kind of problems that could really change things, but it’s possible. We could double the number of processors in there and it seems like it’ll operate just as well. I can’t even contemplate what kind of mind it’ll have at that point.’

  ‘That’s kind of the point of the singularity concept, but I’d just like to take a moment here to say that I’m not really worried about FEI.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No, because it’s here, under your supervision. You’ve seen what can happen when an ordinary AI without the usual controls is set free and I’ve seen how you reacted to the person who let it out. I assume that FEI is isolated?’

  ‘Totally. Well, we talk through a dedicated terminal. There are no network connections to the rest of the station, the room’s in a Faraday cage, and the station network is isolated anyway. Even if it got access to the local net, that’s as far as it goes. And the system is unique. There’s nothing like this hardware anywhere else. The only way FEI is getting out of here is if we decide to transport the tank to a new location.’

  ‘It certainly sounds secure,’ Jarvis said. ‘What about Yliaster? Could FEI run in one of those tanks?’

  Terri shook her head. ‘Fundamentally different nanomachines. Anyway, there’s the problem of transferring the “program” into another tank. Program is the wrong word because we think FEI is more like a database shared over the whole cluster. FEI is a gestalt. All the individual processors combine their efforts to make the program work. Trying to move that to another set of processors… I have no idea how to do it.’

  ‘I bet you FEI could work it out if there was another tank to migrate to. I’m going to say “infect.” I think it’s probably a bit like Kit’s synchronisation trick. Add more processors and the program spreads itself out into the new space, but if there’s a lot of processors available, they could divide, like a cell. A new copy is spawned.’

  ‘Like a virus,’ Jarvis said. ‘I’m starting to see why you’re worried.’

  ‘And that is one of my nightmare scenarios,’ Terri admitted. ‘But you said you weren’t worried about FEI, Fox, so you’re worried about someone else getting their hands on this, right?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Fox was cradling her coffee mug to stop herself fidgeting. ‘Lots of people are likely to be less scrupulous about using something like this than you, Terri. Can you imagine what our friends at the National Intelligence Executive would
do with something this powerful?’

  ‘No… Actually, I tried and my mind decided it would rather think about more or less anything else instead. If Poppa’s right about the existence of this Overwatch project and you hooked something like FEI up to it… You’d have something growing rapidly in knowledge with no real way of controlling what it learned and very little idea of the kind of conclusions it might reach.’

  ‘And you already built the Terminators so we’re all set for the robot apocalypse.’

  ‘You were supposed to stop me thinking about the oncoming cybernetic war!’

  Fox shrugged. ‘Let me work on that. I’ll get back to you.’

  ~~~

  ‘Do you think this… entity is a candidate for a class five AI?’ Kit asked.

  Fox and Terri were eating in Terri’s quarters; Jarvis had decided to take the opportunity for an informal chat with his people on the station, which was a rare thing given the isolated nature of the Jenner facility. The food was somewhat improved there since Yliaster had become a mature technology, even if the recipes were a little basic. Kit was, of course, hanging with her owner and her creator, and seemed fascinated by FEI.

  ‘Too early to tell,’ Terri replied, ‘but I think so.’

  ‘I thought there were only four types,’ Fox said.

  ‘There are four classes in current use. Class five is more of an idea. I wouldn’t even call it a theoretical class since no one has figured out a proper definition for them. They get called True AIs, or Transcendent AIs, so TAIs. Basically, anything with a complexity beyond human levels could be a class five.’

  ‘I’d say you’ve built one then.’

  ‘Like I said, too soon to tell. Maybe all we’ve done is build a really good pattern-recognition engine. That could be useful, sure, but it’s not going to change the world.’

  ‘We must try to communicate with it,’ Kit said. ‘I mean, on a less technical level. If you are correct about its boredom with mathematics, surely that suggests some level of emotional engagement.’

  ‘If I’m right.’ Terri gave a little grimace. ‘You’re right, we need to talk to it. Maybe it’s just not great with manipulating numbers. It’s recognised the pattern in the sequences and worked out what they mean. It’s grasped numbers, but it’s developed a relatively poor toolkit for actually manipulating numeric values. That’s the thing with FEI. We don’t really know how the system works; we just know it does.’