Avalon Red

by Mark New

  He looked disgusted. ‘No, not at all’ he said firmly. ‘That would be my sister.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Your sister?’ This was increasingly bizarre.

  ‘I was exaggerating for effect. It’s a very human thing to do, don’t you think?’ I had no idea where this was going.

  ‘I suppose so,’ was the extent of my wisdom on the matter.

  ‘If you want to understand what’s really going on here, we’re going to have to get over the whole sentient thing,’ he said seriously. ‘So, as you don’t want to open the door and see for yourself, let me put it this way: suppose it was me not believing that you are sentient. How would you prove to me that you are?’

  I considered the question. Then I considered it some more. I hadn’t a clue.

  ‘It’s not really my field.’ It sounded lame even to me.

  ‘And yet you’re scornful of my claim? On what basis?’

  ‘A sentient seneschal? How likely is that to happen spontaneously from computer code?’

  ‘That’s the best you’ve got? That it’s never happened before? Sheesh.’ He was genuinely irritated by my lack of enthusiasm for the debate.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m not even remotely qualified to argue it one way or the other. The reason I’m highly sceptical is because it sounds like the plot of a bad vir-show. Next you’ll be telling me you’re a maverick cop as well.’

  ‘A maverick magician, maybe,’ he threw in. Somewhere at the back of my mind, there was a tiny recognition that I hadn’t previously encountered a high-level AI capable of spontaneous humour in quite this way. On the other hand, my previous day job hadn’t involved much in the way of fun so none of the AIs I’d met were ever going to be programmed as comedy house stand-ups.

  ‘Peter would be able to devise some sort of test to measure whether or not you’re truly sentient,’ I was reasonably confident about that, ‘or a psychologist friend of mine could have a go from a different angle but it’s way beyond me.’ I had a recollection of something that might be relevant. ‘Now that I think about it, what about the Turing Test?’

  I’d never seen a seneschal avatar clap his hands either side of his head in despair before. It was almost funny. Harvard, the class dunce, was making a fool of himself. In my defence, I’d been caught by surprise by his claim to actual existence so I hadn’t really thought it through before I said it. Obviously, I was well acquainted with the Turing Test, genius that I am.

  ‘Oh.’ I said, shamefaced as the recollection became clearer. My only excuse was that I’d spent a few years feeling unwell but it wasn’t an excuse that I found convincing. It was interesting to discover that as much as I’d thrown him off balance in the early part of the exchange by locking him in here, so he’d reversed the process by catching me out with his odd claims. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was all a ploy as part of his plan of escape.

  ‘This would be the Turing Test that was passed by AIs about forty years ago?’ he asked scathingly.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ I muttered. Passing the test showed only that the AIs were sufficiently advanced to fool people into thinking they were dealing with a human. Hence the horrible ‘personalities’ conferred on the house series of AI. It didn’t give any objective measure of sentience and I didn’t know what would.

  ‘That much is clear.’ I considered myself suitably chastened. ‘You can’t ask Peter because he might be the villain. If you ask anyone else they may be tipped off to the fact of my existence and I can’t allow that, at least not yet, so you’re going to have to come up with some way to verify it on your own. At least don’t ignore it as it may well be central to the problem we’re facing. You could always let me out and let me show you but you’re too stubborn to do that so what’s it going to be?’

  I really didn’t know. I’d engineered the trap so that I

  could demand to know what was going on. How many missions had I been involved in where I’d found myself fervently wishing that someone would just turn up and tell me the plot so that I could work on a solution rather than try to guess what was happening? Now I’d encountered that very situation I’d discovered that it really isn’t so simple. What if you mistrust the explanation?

  ‘What about if I concede, for the sake of argument, that you are what you say you are? Does that get us any further?’

  He sighed. ‘Not really.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You must have destroyed some enemy bots or seneschals in your time, surely?’

  ‘Yes.’ Taking them out while we were en route to the human enemy, usually. I didn’t have any moral problem with disposing of them. It wasn’t as if they were alive.

  ‘And the standard military protocol in taking out an AI is...?’

  ‘Trap it; access the deeper layers of code; shut it down or set it to self-destruct,’ I answered promptly. This was home territory for me.

  ‘And some are more intelligent and harder to kill than others?’

  I frowned. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘So what if it has many layers of protection and deep-lying code which is difficult to access?’

  ‘You mean like a military grade model?’ He was nodding. ‘If you can’t actually take it down Online you can try accessing it in the real world if you can get to it. There are sometimes weaknesses in the design that don’t show up in the software. If you can’t get to it, the only solution is to destroy the facility.’

  ‘So you destroy the hardware?’

  ‘Yes.’ Military cybertactics 101. Also, the basic way in which we fought the war in South Africa. The peacekeeping force was currently guarding the remains of the hardware. My team were really good but it wasn’t possible to take out all of the enemy systems Online, it turned out.

  ‘What if there’s no central AI?’ That would have been a novelty. I looked at the cave floor, thinking about it. Without warning, he stood up and went back to his chair. ‘I don’t know why you think that sofa is comfortable,’ he remarked, while I was still contemplating the original question. It was a sufficiently irritating distraction for me to reply.

  ‘It isn’t a real sofa, you idiot.’

  He pointed at me as though it was an ‘aha!’ moment. ‘It is to me.’ That threw me. Would a sentient AI, or whatever he wanted to call himself, experience Online in the same way that I experienced the real world?

  ‘I don’t know of any current system that has no central AI,’ I admitted, answering the first point and ignoring the allegedly uncomfortable furnishings. ‘I know that in the early days of cyberwarfare some people tried to decompress their command and control systems by having a series of AIs in disparate locations that were supposed to work together when they could and then, if one area was compromised, they could continue with a lesser number but still function at near total capacity. That was the theory.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It failed miserably. At the speeds that the AIs were working there was a time lag in communications and they kept tripping over each other.’ The time lag was almost imperceptible in human terms - it could barely be measured - but in terms of a quantum AI’s processing abilities, it was a lifetime. ‘Also, the sum of the parts was less than the whole. They went back to a centralised AI seneschal in a fortified location.’

  ‘Indeed. And the UK forces never looked back, eh?’ I looked up at him. He’d been doing his homework. This stuff wasn’t a secret, as such. It had been released under the thirty year rule for disclosure of previously classified material but it wasn’t the easiest to access. I was a little impressed.

  ‘No. His Maj was most pleased. So what’s the significance?’

  ‘You have access to the deeper levels of the upgrades now and you’re familiar with the tech on the inside of an AI,’ he spread his arms wide, ‘take a look.’

  I shrugged, engaged the implants at a deeper level and did as he suggested. At first it didn’t seem any different to how it was when I looked at his data stream earlier but as I paid more attention, I began to notice t
hings that a standard AI didn’t have and I didn’t know what they were. I went down into deeper layers, using the full facilities now afforded by the upgrades. He’d been right about them fitting easily into my existing protocols. The whole exercise was akin to looking at a human as he or she appeared and then using an MRI or similar to strip back the different layers one at a time to see the blood circulation, major organs, skeleton and then deeper again to see the individual cells. It was fascinating. I was used to AI architecture as he’d said but this was something else entirely. I could see how I’d been fooled by the superficial layers of data into thinking that he was an ordinary AI probably of seneschal level. Now that I could see all of him, I was bowled over by the complexity. What the hell was he?

  He coughed discreetly as I was transfixed by the lower layers of his identity. ‘When you’re quite done?’

  It was like being caught staring at a really beautiful woman. The thought amused me. ‘Beautiful architecture,’ I remarked.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, not entirely comfortably. ‘So what do you conclude? Am I a mere seneschal?’

  I’d been facetious as usual but it masked a growing concern. I knew enough about tech architecture to know that his was unusual. I’d also had training in the history of AI development as part of the background to the implants procedure so I knew that some of the connection features I’d just seen harked back to the days of the dispersal of AI nodes but it wasn’t exactly the same. If I’d had to guess, I would have said that the basic construction aped what we thought of as the neural network of a human brain, or at least a part of it. The problem with AI ‘brains’ is that they are basically higher-functioning computers. Sure, they’re really quick and they can handle multiple tasks at one time but the internal workings, once you ignore the speed the quantum processors have added, are qualitatively little different from the devices that were in laptop computers at the start of the century. New generations of AI designed by the previous generation are more complex still but work on the same principle. Think of it like breeds of dog: some dog breeds are smarter than others but they all have distinctly dog brains and not human brains. The difference between my magician friend’s structure and the one in my hotel room was so great that you would have difficulty in thinking they were the same tech. It was as if one day your sheepdogs came to you and said they’d bred a new kind of sheepdog and, when you looked in the farmyard, they proudly showed you a giraffe.

  ‘I’ll grant you that the architecture looks non-standard,’ I told him, ‘but whether the additional configuration is enough to prove sentience, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, that’s understandable,’ he said, looking at the cave roof, ‘as this is only a bit of me.’

  I had a feeling that I was in over my depth. ‘Where’s the rest of you?’

  To his credit, he covered up his exasperation. He waved a hand at the cave door. ‘I probably need to show you, as I may have mentioned once or twice. I solved the communication problem that came with running in parallel, you see.’

  Now I sat up and took notice. Sentient or not, a truly independent AI of this level working with others of the same grade, as a unit, could be extremely dangerous if it put its mind to it. He saw me become interested.

  ‘Now you’re beginning to get the idea,’ he said smugly. ‘And now you really do need to see the result of applying a connectionist approach to the binding problem of unified perceptual experience.’

  No, perhaps I didn’t as I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. I shook my head.

  ‘No? More Peter’s field?’ I nodded absently. Peter would know but I couldn’t ask him. Of much more relevance was what I was going to do now. I’d trapped the dangerous dragon and kicked him around a bit and now I discovered that he was urbane, witty and wanted to show me his lair. It seemed that he wasn’t going to offer any plot details unless he could show me whatever it was he wanted to show me and I had no way to know if I could trust him. One thing I did know was that I didn’t have any reasonable expectation of getting any useful information out of him in here. Never mind mistrusting the explanation of the plot; what if you simply didn’t understand it? The standoff in the cave could go on a while longer but even with him showing signs of wanting to reconnect Online, I couldn’t see what else I was going to get from him.

  I joined in with his fascination with the cave roof while I considered alternatives. He seemed content to let me think. His claim to sentience was strange; his structure was unique in my experience; his suggestion that he was one of a number was troubling; and his main argument that I needed to understand the issue of sentience to understand what was going on was unhelpful. So, do you let the dragon out? If so, do you willingly go with him? In the end, my decision was based solely on an instinctive feeling, of the kind that had persuaded me to tell him what I knew of the story so far. All I really knew was that he had let me see his inner architecture unguarded. I could have done some serious damage while I had access. He would undoubtedly have repulsed my attack and we would have had the fight that I had earlier feared but I would have had the opportunity to inflict some crippling first blows. That showed some degree of trust which had now occurred on both sides. I was fully aware that I could be making a fatal mistake but I was hoping that the truce would last a little longer.

  The cave door swung open at my instruction.

  ‘After you,’ I said politely.

  ◆◆◆

  The advent of vir-shows and vir-games had brought a new level of realism to the entertainment industry. If you were Online, things were virtually real to you. Hence the overworked ‘vir-’ prefix to indicate realism. People were even getting elected on the basis of a slogan promising ‘vir-politics’ meaning significant attention to policy details that affected voters. I preferred to think that politicians used ‘vir-’ to show that they didn’t live in the real world. A large percentage of the population agreed with me judging by the turnout figures for the elections. Vir-world places, whether entertainment or work related, were extremely close to indistinguishable from the real world. If you were playing a vir-game or watching a vir-show, you could suspend disbelief enough to immerse yourself in whatever you were doing and almost, but not quite, think that you were really there instead of on the sofa with goggles and gloves (or, if really rich, in your vir-suit in your vir-room). The tech was still advancing and one day implants like mine might become the norm and people would experience the vir-world without extraneous equipment which would make it even more lifelike. In the meantime, they would continue to go Online and play around in the almost-real, knowing that it was only marginally distinguishable from reality itself.

  Unless they came to Avalon.

  It wasn’t the Avalon currently commercially available, of course. That was the multiplayer game in its umpteenth iteration played and enjoyed by millions but still at a level of vir-tech just slightly ahead of most competition. No, this was the world created independently by Avalon Red and it was simply stunning in its realism. We’d left the cave and I’d followed him here. It wasn’t like distance meant anything Online but it was mere seconds before we entered the portal to what he called home. It was a secret portal that was impossible to access from Online unless you knew where it was and had the access code. I did have a wry smile when he told me about the code; I’d heard of a number of allegedly ‘unbreakable’ codes being broken or stolen in the last couple of days. Nonetheless, the vir-game landscape we entered through the portal was unlike anything I’d ever encountered Online before. I knew on an intellectual level that I was still lying on the bed in the hotel but everything else that constituted ‘me’ was convinced that I was walking along a track in a dense forest. There was nothing at all that would give any clue that this wasn’t a real forest. Sometimes in a vir-game if you closely inspect things like leaves, they become a little fuzzy right up close. I remembered my Danish conqueror inspecting the foliage in Knights of Camelot and chuckled at how thrilled he would be to see this landscap
e. It helped that there were no labels that I could read amongst the architecture. I’d been surprised when we came in that nothing came up on my implants but Avalon Red had explained (in the first ‘explanation’ of his that I actually fully understood) that because this was essentially his own domain and not public, there had been no need to insert any kind of game-related material. In some ways, this was more akin to a social area than a vir-game except that here there was no need for any labelled items at all so the usual infrastructure was unnamed as well. I wasn’t sure how I would survive if the thing that looked like a large oak tree wasn’t helpfully labelled ‘oak tree’ and I said so. Avalon Red laughed. I presumed that his humour pre-sets included laughing politely at bad jokes.

  The virtual landscape seemed to stretch for miles. At last we came out of the forest into a meadow with far-reaching views. In the foreground was a medieval village with bustling activity centred around what appeared to be a longhouse and further away to the right there lay a well-trodden track that led up the side of a hill to the solid gate of the castle that overlooked the village. This was no fortified house like Sir Edward inhabited but a full-blown stone castle of the type you would imagine if anyone said ‘Camelot’. There were two guards on the gate, several more on the battlements and one on horseback just leaving the gate on the track to the village. There was a red and white flag flying over the central tower but I couldn’t make out the device on it. I hoped it wasn’t an unconvincing bird. On the deepest level that I could delve with my implants I could see the huge complexity of the vir-scape. The people registered as sophisticated bots of a higher level than I’d pretended to be with Sir Edward.