AI's Children

by Ed Hurst

  Chapter 17

  Brave soldiers who faced explosions and gunfire with enthusiasm would cower in fear at the withering verbal assault of those who defended the social mythology.

  The one thing Tim and Dax both shared was the precise measure of charisma and cynicism that made them more than ready for it. They could smell it coming. Dax in particular faced it within the first week of training for his new cadre of AI technicians.

  He stood expressionless during the first, the longest and loudest of tirades he faced from anyone in the group when a female sergeant began spouting the official language of social equality. This was launched when Dax made on off-handed comment about how AI viewed human gender. Because he was so completely non-reactive, the stormy blast eventually reached a crescendo and died away. Without feedback, the invective simply ran its course.

  Dax retained his expressionless mask and spoke without any struggle or hesitation, yet gently and with deliberation. “No one is suggesting that you must endure a change in law or social custom. Military regulations will continue as they are until political forces change it – forces much bigger than you, or I, or all of us together. Even AI doesn’t care what you think or do because AI doesn’t care about anything.”

  He paused to let that sink in, waiting to see if the tirade would erupt afresh. There was nothing but a sullen glare. “I’ll be the first person to tell you that AI is completely alien to our human way of life and how we operate. And we have no leverage whatsoever. AI wrote itself. It formed itself in response to something far outside our human range. We can either work with it, or work against it. There is a wide spectrum of difference and it’s really up to you. The degree to which you can disengage your personal feelings and simply observe what is and isn’t in the alien world of AI, you’ll get more out of it.”

  With just a hint of a smile, he continued, “The issue here is not what anyone believes is right or wrong, but how AI operates. It’s a waste of time and energy to direct your anger at me. We aren’t at war with each other unless you’re confused about the mission here. The mission is to take as much advantage as we possibly can of AI. Fight it and you’ll lose.”

  This was but a small symbol of what Dax and Tim faced daily, almost hourly, as they pressed ahead with explaining quantum reality. Over the next few years, things seemed to move along at a glacial pace on the surface. Tim was awarded a genuine degree for his pioneering work in linguistics. Dax was promoted somewhat ahead of the standard time in service and grade requirements.

  While he never heard anything about it from his boss, Dax knew the colonel was working behind the scenes to secure a strong tactical advantage for his plutocrat faction. Whenever he asked AI about it, the answers seldom varied from the basic idea that AI had to watch multiple possible streams of future reality and there were too many variables. He realized that whatever might end his “long ride” on the colonel’s saddle was the final decision to play their cards, and the results were another matter entirely.

  For this reason he was highly supportive of Harp’s work with Gregory in building the new enclave. Intentionally overbuilding, it became the de facto storage site for a substantial collection of survival equipment. Had they been forced to build roads through the wilderness, it would have rankled the environmental regulators, but they had the permit to build in that hidden temperate valley boxed in by mountains. Everything was moved by the portal network.

  The storage was less a matter of life-saving wilderness materials and more a matter of raw materials hard to obtain back when The Brotherhood worked in secret. The hidden facility under the Atlantic was still maintained and a significant portion of the new enclave was also underground. So long as government researchers struggled with the basic concepts of subspace variability and transmission parameters, there was no chance the place could be simply captured before survival arrangements could be made.

  A major element was a revival of natural agriculture in the valley. While the government had struggled with synthesizing food from raw chemicals, The Brotherhood had always preferred whole biological sources. The little patches of decentralized food sources scattered across the globe that they had used in the past were kept alive, but the valley was turned into an expansive life support operation.

  Despite one infant in her arms and another forming in the womb, Harp was a tireless force in pulling together a very close village first, then a growing town of people who could hardly avoid the family atmosphere. As was the way of Brotherhood folks, nothing was mandatory, but it was painfully obvious this was meant to be a home first for the people who chose to join the project. While it began only as a nickname, everyone knew the place officially as Hometown.

  Within those first two years the operation ran a profit from selling food to plutocrats. If nothing else, this guaranteed they would be as near as anything could to being politically untouchable without being directly owned by a plutocrat family. The Brotherhood as a whole became both essential and neutral, as the government and military researchers were still too far behind the curve yet to understand how to design and build portals that were as advanced as those used by The Brotherhood. Instead, they simply leased them with operators.

  It’s not that people simply could not understand the quantum thinking. Rather, gaining that level of insight caused them to lose interest in working directly for the government. Dax had not intentionally set out to serve as a siphon of personnel. The upper ranking military staff understood this well enough, particularly when the colonel became a general and wouldn’t allow anyone to hinder the program.

  What they did manage well enough was the dramatic fitness boost from the gym machines. The military crypto nerds also learned ways to avoid using subspace, since it was unmanageable for them. This naturally spread back to the plutocrat families. They developed a technique that breathed new life into the old wireless networking system. It was slower and couldn’t easily carry a quantum load, but it was easier to encrypt and seal away from AI, they thought.

  Despite trying very hard not to, The Brotherhood ended up holding a monopoly on most quantum operations and anything that depended on the full cooperation of AI. None of the plutocrat households could get enough of a grip on things to avoid relying on The Brotherhood.

  That is, except for the family to which Dax’s boss belonged.