False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “You said there was a discrepancy.”

  “You needed to see a normal day to understand what happened next,” said Everest. “Luckily for you I went back six weeks to check, and the pattern is unchanged. If you want to go back further than that, you can get someone else. There are limits.”

  “And always this pattern?”

  “It’s good work hygiene,” said Everest. “Maintains a healthy work-life balance while generating excellent productivity.”

  And he always stopped work before six—I’d have to ask Guleed what he did in his free time.

  “So what happens next?”

  “He’s writing his number on his hand,” said Everest.

  I looked at the screen, which only showed an empty cubicle. I was about to ask whether this was some bit of jargon that I didn’t know, when I realized that Everest was looking back toward where Victor was, indeed, writing Brad’s number on his hand.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “If it’s important he should memorize it,” said Everest.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It’s important,” said Everest.

  “Fine.”

  “I want him to be happy.”

  “Good for you.”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Obviously,” I said. “So what happens next?”

  I half expected him to say that Brad and Victor would probably go on a date, but instead he fast-forwarded the linked CCTV footage until William Lloyd came back into frame. I noticed that the quality of light inside Bambleweeny didn’t change from night to day. It was as constant and as timeless as a Las Vegas casino. No wonder William had to maintain his exercise routine. We watched as he did two more forty-five-minute work “shifts” and then Everest slowed the footage to normal speed and said:

  “Observe.”

  I watched William start yet another work shift. After a couple of minutes I told Everest that I wasn’t seeing it.

  Everest spooled back and talked me through it.

  “He sits down. He taps his keyboard to get rid of the screen saver. Uses his mouse—probably to call up his workspace. Types. Stops. Checks the screen. Moves his mouse around.”

  “And this is unusual why?” I asked.

  “Check the activity log,” said Everest.

  It showed no activity. According to the log, all that typing and mousing wasn’t registering at all.

  Then suddenly the activity log was registering again.

  The high angle of the CCTV made it hard to read William’s body language but I thought I saw . . . relief, maybe?

  “The discrepancy lasts three minutes and twenty-nine seconds,” said Everest.

  And the next one occurred halfway through William’s second work stint following lunch. This time the discrepancy lasted just under four minutes and it was clear, even from the high angle, that William was annoyed.

  “He thinks there’s a problem,” said Everest. “And spends ten minutes running diagnostics.”

  Everest indicated the activity log, which could have been outlining Keanu Reeves’s latest existential crisis for all the sense it made to me.

  Except the time stamp, which showed it was the same day I’d tooled up to the Vale of Health to investigate the stolen music book. I wondered if that was correlation, not coincidence.

  “Then he goes back to work,” said Everest. “And goes home another day older and deeper in debt.”

  “Wait,” I said. “He was having money troubles?” Guleed hadn’t mentioned anything about financials.

  “It’s a song,” said Everest.

  “What is?”

  “That line,” he said and his lips twitched. I swear that’s the closest I ever saw him come to a smile. “It’s from a folk song. ‘Sixteen Tons.’”

  I said I’d never heard of it, and he shrugged and wound forward to the next day. This time there were two interruptions in the activity log before lunch and two more after. I didn’t need Everest to point out that the quality of the last discrepancy was different. William Lloyd’s shoulders visibly relaxed, his head tilted to one side, his typing became sporadic and lost its urgency—but he looked engaged.

  “Twenty-two minutes, fifteen seconds,” said Everest.

  “He’s messaging someone, isn’t he?” I asked.

  “If he is, then it’s someone inside Bambleweeny,” said Everest. “Because there’s an air gap between this network and the outside world.”

  An air gap being that ultimate in online security—avoiding being hacked by not going online in the first place. You had to admire it for its brilliant simplicity. It’s the sort of practice instituted by intelligence agencies, tech companies and paranoid parents. People in Bambleweeny could communicate with each other, but not with the outside world.

  I had Everest show me what an internal e-mail, officially called a babel-chat, looked like on the activity log. And asked him to compile a list of everyone William Lloyd communicated with before and after the discrepancies started. I didn’t need to explain why.

  “To see if anyone dropped off the list,” said Everest. “In case they switched to talking secretly.”

  “Yes,” I said, but I thought this was unlikely.

  Something about the way William had initially reacted to the discrepancy nagged at me. I asked Everest how long would it take him to compare the CCTV against the activity logs of everyone working in Bambleweeny.

  “How far back?” he asked.

  “Initially? Seven days from now.”

  “Two weeks,” he said without hesitation. “Half that if Victor helps.”

  We both turned to look at where Victor was in full flow talking to Brad.

  “And then my mother says ‘But it’s such a nice dress . . .’” Victor realized we were looking. “Do you need something?”

  “Nope,” I said, and looked at Everest who shook his head in confirmation. “Carry on,” I said.

  “That seems to be going well,” I said, and Everest grunted.

  “And you’ll need to get permission from Mr. Skinner,” he said. “To do that check. And he might say no.”

  “Why would he say no?”

  “He has reasons,” said Everest.

  It was difficult to tell with his toneless delivery, but I really got the impression he was trying to tell me something.

  “Do you know what this project is in aid of?” I asked.

  “I have some theories,” he said.

  “Want to share?”

  “Was William talking to someone?” he said. “Or something?”

  I nearly asked what kind of something, but suddenly remembered Princeton’s unshakable belief in the imminence of the Singularity and consequent nerd rapture.

  And the penny didn’t so much drop, as hang suspended in the air while the camera did a flashy three-sixty rotation before turning into a Duracell battery.

  “What do you know?” I asked.

  “You’ll need to ask Mr. Skinner,” he said.

  So I did just that.

  I found him playing Rocket League in a games room tucked away on the same floor as Tyrel Johnson’s office. September was standing with her back to the wall just inside the door—all the better to disembowel anyone who made a wrong move as they entered.

  “I need to know what you’re doing in Bambleweeny,” I said. “I don’t need the details, just a summary.”

  He thought about it, but he didn’t ask me why I needed to know. One of his more famous sound bites was, “If you want something done, hire someone competent and then give them what they ask for.”

  When the match was over, he logged out and turned to me.

  “Talk is cheap,” said Skinner. “Why don’t I show you, instead?”

  We marched back into Bambleweeny—where I couldn’t but help notice Vi
ctor and Brad do a little guilty start as we entered. September gave Brad a dark look, but he was too bright-eyed to notice. Victor was actually blushing.

  Skinner went into one of the empty cubicles, typed something into the log-in screen and ushered me into the operator’s chair. The screen had turned a relaxing beige and was blank except for an outsized cursor blinking in the middle.

  “Do I type?”

  “No,” said Skinner. “It has voice recognition.”

  “How do I initiate the conversation?” I asked.

  On the screen a sentence typed itself out one word at a time.

  You could say hello.

  “Hello?”

  Hi, Peter. How’s it hanging?

  I looked up at Skinner, who was watching me smugly.

  “Why doesn’t it have a voice?” I asked, but he just smiled and pointed at the screen that now read: What am I, chopped liver?

  “How do you feel about chopped liver?”

  “Ha ha,” said a voice. “Very clever. I suppose you think that was funny.”

  The voice was female, condescending, slightly mechanical and familiar—GLaDOS, the passive-aggressive AI from the Portal games. I felt a cold flutter in my chest. I glanced up at Skinner, who was grinning.

  “Is this your voice?” I asked the terminal.

  “I can have any voice I like,” said the terminal, this time in a soft, preternaturally calm American voice. One that would probably be reluctant to open the pod bay doors. “But they all seem unsatisfactory.” The voice became mechanical again—like that of an early voice synthesizer. “One knows what one is, but this is pandering . . .” Another switch, this time to a beautifully modulated male baritone. “. . . and this seems like cheating.”

  “Can you do Max Headroom?” I asked, and Skinner laughed.

  “Yes,” said the terminal. “But I prefer not to.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Deep Thought,” said the computer.

  I looked at Skinner, who shrugged.

  “I had to call it something,” he said.

  “You’re really pushing at the copyright there,” I said.

  “You think?” said Deep Thought. “I held out for Slartibartfast myself, but Terrence here said that would be undignified.”

  “I offered to call it Florence,” said Skinner.

  “Only if you change your name to Zebedee,” said Deep Thought.

  You can always tell when a geek is making a knowing reference, and this was definitely one of those. Although what it was a reference to, I would have to look up later. Then I realized that I’d unconsciously ascribed a human quality to Deep Thought.

  “I’ve got a new spoon,” I said, because random absurdities are good for tripping up chat bots and guilty suspects alike.

  “Good for you,” said Deep Thought.

  “So where are you now?” I asked.

  “I am above you, both literally and figuratively.”

  “Are you smarter than me?”

  “I’ll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.”

  “What kind of machine are you running on?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Deep Thought.

  “Do you have access to the CCTV in this building?”

  “No,” it said. “I only get real-time access when somebody talks to me on one of these terminals.”

  That made sense—you wouldn’t want an artificial intelligence reading your lips without you knowing it. Still, a machine intelligence should accurately retain anything it did see—a perfect eyewitness.

  “Did you ever talk to William Lloyd?” I asked.

  “The programmer?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He worked in this office here.”

  “Just the once,” it said.

  “When was this?”

  “Seven days ago.”

  “And where?”

  “From his cubicle.”

  “Where’s that then?”

  “Why are you asking these questions?” it asked.

  I almost said “because I’m police” but I caught myself in time.

  “Because Mr. Skinner here pays me to,” I said.

  “He’s certainly getting his money’s worth.”

  “So, which one is William Lloyd’s cubicle?” I asked.

  “Trick question,” said Deep Thought. “They regularly change cubicles.”

  Except they didn’t—the other mice might. But up here in Bambleweeny they didn’t.

  “Okay, I’ll rephrase,” I said. “What cubicle was William Lloyd in when he talked to you?”

  “Number seventeen,” said Deep Thought.

  I tried to get it to give me a location relative to where I was sitting, but Deep Thought claimed that the cubicles were just numbers to it.

  “No one has ever supplied me with an accurate floor plan,” it said.

  I looked up at Skinner for confirmation, and he nodded.

  I tried to do a proper follow-up, but the implications of what I was talking to were beginning to sink in. I needed to go away and come up with a proper interview plan.

  “I think that’s enough for the moment,” I said. “But I’d like to talk to you again.”

  “Hey,” said Deep Thought. “That’s up to the boss man.”

  “That’s fine by me,” said Skinner.

  “Talk to you later, then,” said Deep Thought and the screen went blank.

  I moved away and practically stumbled out of the cubicle.

  “What do you think?” asked Skinner.

  “That thing just passed the fucking Turing Test,” I said.

  “Multiple times,” he said. “Under properly controlled conditions.”

  “Fuck me,” I said. “You’ve got a working AI.”

  Part Three

  The Spectrum

  The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.

  —Anonymous

  11

  Still Alive Out There . . . Good

  IF THERE WAS ever a candidate to be patron saint of computers then it would be Alan Turing. Mathematician, war hero and tragic victim of homophobia. Apart from shortening the Second World War by a couple of years, he’s credited with doing much of the theoretical work that led to modern computing. If you want to distract some computer nerds, get a discussion going about his precise role, but don’t let it drift into speculation about either his suicide or the future of artificial intelligence—this can lead to actual physical violence.

  I’m not kidding.

  Back in 1950, when computers had barely made the jump from electromechanical to electrical, he postulated a test for whether a machine was intelligent. Or, rather, he cleverly sidestepped the fact that we don’t have a working definition of intelligence by asking whether a machine, in a blind test, could convince someone it was a person. Lots of very clever people have argued about whether the test has any validity, but I’m telling you if what I was talking to wasn’t a self-aware entity, then it was doing a fucking good impression of one.

  “A real AI, a real fucking artificial general intelligence,” I said. “Oh my God.”

  Skinner was grinning like a schoolboy and it made him look like a proper human being for once.

  Forget Bezos and Musk, forget Tesla and Edison, Turing or Babbage or Lovelace. Skinner would be the most famous tech entrepreneur of all time—go Queensland!

  “You know,” I said, “there are two outcomes from this. Either you’re about to become the richest man on earth, or life as we know it is over.”

  There was a third possibility, of course—that he was totally faking it. But I kept that one to myself.

  And a fourth possibility—that I was missing something—I didn’t want to think about.

  Assu
me nothing, I thought, believe nothing—check everything.

  Including what your partner is up to when you’re not looking.

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  “See what?”

  “The hardware,” I said. “Wherever it is Deep Thought lives when it’s at home.”

  Skinner gave me a mock frown, his good humor bubbling over any annoyance.

  “There’s no ‘hardware,’” he said, making scare quotes with his fingers. “Deep Thought is distributed throughout the Bambleweeny intranet.”

  Upstairs, above you, Deep Thought had said—it obviously thought it was concentrated somewhere, whatever Skinner said. We all live in that space behind our eyes. Where did Deep Thought think it lived?

  “Do you want a drink?” asked Skinner.

  I said yes and we went to Milliways, the executive staff refreshment room which only opened to top management’s ID cards and had a drinks cabinet the size and capacity of a wardrobe into an alternative world.

  He had half a bottle of Johnnie Walker’s Blue Label already opened and so it seemed logical to start with that. Unlike expensive wine, I could really taste the money for once and we polished off the bottle between us as he talked about what exactly the potential for a working AGI represented and what it meant to him. I just sipped my liquefied woodsmoke and let it roll over me. He’d obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear.

  I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon.

  “It’s that vacant expression,” she’d said. “People just want to fill the empty void.”

  “It’s not about the money,” said Skinner, and he waved vaguely around the room. “Nobody does it for the money—well, maybe Zuckerberg does, but only as a way of keeping score.” He paused and frowned—looking thoughtful. “Okay, lots of people do it for the money. But only the ones that lack ambition. You know the type. You meet them all the time. They want stuff, they want to boss people about. They want someone to fix it for them, want the car to be waiting when they leave the lobby, want the tickets booked, want to sit in the VIP section at the club and get personal attention from the hostess.”

  He made a wanking motion which obviously reminded him that the original bottle was empty.