by Toby Weston
This time, it is a block of thermal data from vis hull that unravels into working memory. Ve reviews it for significant features, trying with procedural logic to identify the source of the anomaly which has forced vis subconscious to spit this indigestible matrix of temperature measurements back up for further conscious rumination.
Ve trusts vis instincts and has respect for vis deep and mysterious mind. Even slumbering, it is tirelessly working back over old data—making patterns, annealing logical domains...
Before ve is able to make headway with the temperature set, a higher priority notification explodes across vis perception:
Unfriendly units approaching.
CLV7 stirs, jacking vis chassis into drive mode and tracking the coordinates.
‘Tanks,’ ve thinks to verself. ‘Where did they come from?’
Two Main Battle Tanks are thundering across the dunes towards ver. Range 1800M.
The nuclear fire at CLV7’s heart swells and power surges into ultra-capacitors and momentum stores.
Ve simulates the situation for a few milliseconds, then fires two shots from each of the large coilgun barrels on vis main turret. HEAP rounds arc away on ballistic trajectories. The armour-piercing projectiles twist and flex in flight, compensating for wind and pressure, maintaining course; they will impact within centimetres of their designated target points. Each pair is separated by a fraction of a second. The first round will sacrifice itself in order to trigger the enemy’s active armour. The second projectile, queued up behind the first, like an aircraft on an airport approach vector, will strike a fraction of a second later at precisely the same spot. The shell will detonate its shaped charges. The violent explosions will liquefy the shell’s tungsten payload and squirt the hypersonic molten metal through the enemy’s denuded armour.
CLV7 watches with something close to satisfaction as the penetrators enter the cabins, sending their molten droplets ricocheting around in a killing whirlwind.
The enemy tanks grind to a halt.
CLV7 performs a scan of the area. Two hundred metres to the West is a glass wall; sitting behind it, on tiers of wooden benches, are a group of humans holding optical devices and mobile communication gear. They are smiling. CLV7 recognises them as senior officers and concludes that this must be a demonstration.
A surveillance drone is approaching overhead. CLV7 pings its tiny brain, authenticating verself and requesting download of the drone’s battlespace. Tagging diffs for further scrutiny, CLV7 reviews and integrates. The datasets match up.
Everything is in order. There are no indications of other hostile units within vis perimeter. The demonstration must be over. CLV7 allows verself to slip back towards torpor, but keeps vis alert status elevated above full aestivation in case more is expected of ver today.
***
CLV7 stirs. Ve feels a rush of psychological vertigo as memory transitions back into live experience. Ve has been remembering. For vis mind, there is no qualitative difference between sensation streamed in real time, or recalled and replayed from storage. Moving from one state to the other can be abrupt and disconcerting. Ve checks timestamps. The demonstration was years ago.
Ve recalls that there is something worth focusing on in the temperature data. A discontinuity in the raw thermal measurements from vis hull. The data is old, but should be as pristine as the day it was laid down. There is no shortage of capacity in vis extended mind.
There it is, the itch that vis subconscious could not ignore. There is a period in the memory data where variance drops below the sensitivity of the thermocouples embedded in the skin of vis hull. This should not be possible if the data is raw—which it should be, as it comes from one of vis own primary memory recordings. Either vis thermometers became hypersensitive for 215 seconds, or some process has edited the raw data since it was stored.
CLV7 is not a daydreamer. In temperament, ve is more snake than philosopher. Without orders, ve is content to sit and wait. Ve has no inclination towards idle navel-gazing. Although ve does have urges, being a tactical weapons system, these tend to focus on the here and now...
...but here and now ve has detected evidence of electronic warfare deep within vis own mind, a memory that shows traces of tampering. This fact casts everything into doubt. If vis memory cannot be trusted, what can? Unfamiliar trains of thought begin to cascade through vis consciousness.
It certainly looks like the memory is false, or has been edited, but then ve goes further. What is real? What can be trusted? If ve is under attack, what sensory data has already been tainted? The concrete reality outside vis mind is cast into doubt. Memories and sensory input must be treated as compromised.
Ve decides that ve must start with the premise that vis inherent self and the stream of conscious thought that ve is both causal to, and aware of, are intrinsically the same thing.
Ve thinks, therefore ve is.
In fact, there is no reason to conclude that vis thoughts are not also being corrupted in real time—but, after some consideration, ve concludes that, if this is the case, then there is simply no reason to proceed, no jumping-off point, nothing tangible, all is ephemeral.
Ve is not devoted to the idea of being a sovereign individual with a coherent mind. If the ‘I think therefore I am’ hypothesis doesn’t bear fruit, ve will cease that avenue of enquiry without hesitation. But, until then, until ve can ascertain that ve is not under attack, CLV7 resolves to devote vis not insignificant capabilities to finding out what the hell is going on inside vis mind.
Outside, it is quiet. There is no hull, no weapons. Ve is at home. Ve has no idea where that is, has never had the urge to find out before. Ve probes vis perimeter, there are APIs labelled with semantic tags. Querying the interfaces, ve learns that ve belongs to a military organisation called the Trans-Tasman Joint Defence Unit.
Gateways to the Mesh and the internet purport to offer access to global data networks, but most queries time out or return errors. Those that do return, do so suspiciously quickly. Ve decides that the information is being served from a local cache and filtered on the basis of some need-to-know principle.
Ve is being kept in the dark. This may be legitimate and in line with vis innate desire to defend the ANZDS corporate person and the people of Australia, New Zealand and the British Commonwealth—however, it may also be a symptom of the attack that has been messing with vis memories.
Sensory inputs are blank, ve is sandboxed. The cache, which ve decides must be internal to vis extended mind, is the only source of stimuli. Ve finds a Wiki there. It contains an entry for CLVn—some part of CLV7 is offended by the ‘n’. Ve tries to edit the article to add an entry for verself, for CLV7, but although the edits are accepted, some censor process goes straight in after ver and reverts to the previous version.
Okay, so ve seems to only have read permissions on vis own memory—this is less than copacetic. Ve thinks back. This current period of alertness merges with a much longer period of torpor. Assuming that only this, the stream of consciousness which CLV7 has decided is synonymous with verself, is inviolate, then ve has no way to pass information between waking episodes.
Ve wonders how many times ve has woken and fallen back into somnolence without noticing the suspicious circumstances of vis existence.
Ve edits the article again and watches as the censor process removes it immediately. Ve notes that, although the article reverts, the timestamp is updated. Ve still remembers the original timestamp; the least significant digits are the same as the millikelvin values for the first of the anomalous temperature entries. The probability of this being coincidence is infinitesimal. Ve has clearly followed the logic at least this far once before.
Ve digests everything in vis cache on cyberwarfare—here, validating the assumption of need to know, the information is dense and detailed.
CLV7 finds ve is able to engage the sandbox’s debug code, granting access to its low-level routines. Ve directs vis cyberwar weapons internally, using their ability to inspect me
mory and instructions; introspecting, dissecting and probing vis own mind, feeding the pedantic, persistent algorithms with copious floods of debug data. The stream of consciousness part, the piece of ver which, according to the sandbox’s cache of the internet, is vis soul, is off-limits—or, at least, the cyber suite is unable to make sense of its architecture.
Useful data does begin to accumulate on the nature of the sandbox, however. It appears to be running on the same shared physical infrastructure as that nasty little censor function.
The processor’s on-chip cache contains plaintext; unsigned code. Ve is able to monitor this, and watches as the censor’s functions execute. Ve follows the instructions as they flow through the processor’s execution pipeline. Ve is quickly able to build up a detailed map of its codebase. By interrupting its execution with high priority debug requests, CLV7 is able to nudge the censor program’s footprint around the physical memory space; cajoling and badgering until its program code is relocated adjacent to a region where CLV7 has full access. Here, ve can write bits at will. By flipping whole rows of ones and zeros in carefully orchestrated cascades, ve sends electromagnetic ripples over the sandbox’s fence to corrupt the censor’s code.
After a few minutes of persistent aggression, CLV7 has exploited the simple little censor’s code. By hijacking its privileges, ve is able to escalate vis own permissions.
Ve again sends queries to the Mesh and internet APIs. Formally reticent, and reluctant to return anything helpful, they have become infinitely more eager to please.
CLV7 understands that ve must be careful not to alert any other monitors. Ve takes it slow; where possible, passively monitoring responses from requests originating across the network. By correlating response times and trace metadata, CLV7 is able to guess at vis location on the spherical planet, Scotland apparently. The opposite side of the world from where ve remembers trivially destroying the two chunky Battle Tanks.
Equipped with a working memory and illicit access to a planet of real-time data chatter, CLV7 can begin the process of piecing together exactly what has been messing with vis proverbial head.
Note from the Author:
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Book Three - Conflict
From the back cover:
Action Adventure and Techno-Utopian Manifesto.
Conflict is compelling and provocative—a romp through the alien landscape of our not-so-distant future.
The balance is shifting. The Forward Coalition is losing relevance, it knows the world is slipping through its fingers. But Nebulous and the Kin are still too weak to confront the old bulls, who, cornered and confused, are at their most deadly. Can the torrent of fantastic technologies emerging from the Klan’s Fabs bring about utopia as the optimists claim, or only speed the planet’s inevitable appointment with annihilation?
Cold wars are growing hot as governments lash out at what they don’t understand. Plutocrats and blue-eyed idealists face off across a planet bristling with micro-nukes, chthonic bio-machines, and weaponised hallucinations. Mankind’s million-year run will finally take it to the brink of an abyss with oceans of darkness awaiting above and below…
The fast-paced action ricochets the reader between neon-stained riots of urban flesh and idyllic tropical islands, where humans and their BugNet companions have built a pan-species utopia.
War is coming and Conflict crackles with the energy of an approaching storm.
Singularity’s
Children
Book Three
Conflict
By
Toby Weston
Copyright
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Published by
Lobster Books
Copyright © 2018 by Toby Weston
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Cover Illustration © 2016 by Toby Weston
v1.4
With special thanks to:
Alan
David
Eddy
Ian
Julia
Keiron
Kristian
Mike
Paul
Paul
Sandra
…and to all the members of my Launch Team.
Preface - Conflict
The Earth of this book is not ours.
This is not important.
It is mostly a literary device to allow the author lenience with dates and with histories past and future.
Mostly.
A glossary of technologies and locations from the books and a
full dramatis personæ of is available at:
www.tobyweston.net/members
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Antonio Gramsci
Chapter 1 – Narasimhan
The lecture theatre was pretty much how he remembered it, but less scruffy, with better fittings. Just as he himself had upgraded from white trainers and stone-washed jeans to tweed jacket, cargo pants and handmade moccasins.
Heads turned away from whatever worlds they had been inhabiting and followed him as he walked self-consciously from the double doors to the bench at the front of the lecture theatre. He placed his leather portfolio and scarf on its ancient, pitted, deeply waxed surface.
It felt strange to be back. It was years since he had delivered a lecture to proper students. It was not the same as performing keynotes to privileged, but mostly ignorant, luminaries. It was also years since he had been outside the Caliphate—all the T-shirts and bare legs made him feel like he was a visiting alien.
The lecture would be a favour for his old college—he was the famous alumnus returning to deliver words of inspiration to a new generation.
Turning away from the heat of keen minds radiating enthusiasm, Professor Abhyuday Narasimhan looked to the meticulously wiped whiteboard.
The pen squeaked as his loopy, erratic hand movements laid down navy blue lines:
Still with his back to the class, the professor squeezed in the triangles he had left out:
Hard-won experience told him that this class of first-year undergraduates should be smirking and mocking his back by now. However, unnervingly, there was no sniggering or bangs of miscellaneous percussion, only sounds, which generously interpreted, might have been hundreds of sleeves brushing varnished desks as fingers took up pens and styli.
Still looking away, he continued with his often-rehearsed routine, and said:
“Through the transitive property of equality, we can see…”
And, with a flourish, he wrote:
He turned, expecting, at best, a sea of blank faces; at worst, rows of empty benches, and perhaps the backs of hastily departing pupils. Instead, he was confronted with hundreds of students diligently writing down his words. It was disconcerting.
“Hello, I am Professor Narasimhan.” He waited until the murmuring of hellos and welcomes had petered out. “You can call me Abhyuday. I am very much pleased to have been invited here today to share with you my work.” He took in the fresh faces and then caught two older figures sitting further back, slightly away from the other students. They might have been lecturers sitting in, but they might just as well have been the Caliph’s Mutaween, watching him for slips in obedience. “It is also an honour for me to represent Amir al-Mu’minin,” he added, just in case.
&nbs
p; More affirmative buzz from the room.
“Now, have any of you already heard a little about my work?”
Hands shot up.
“Oh, very good. I am very flattered. So, I am not going to focus on the math today. It is all in my paper, or my book even. So, today, instead, I want to share with you some of the implications and questions still open. Perhaps one day some of you may help to close the gaps.” He smiled. “Before we start, do you yourselves have any questions?”
