War Orphans (The Terra Nova Chronicles)

by Robert Dean Hall

  “When did you get this news? Alphie and I haven’t heard even a whisper, and we were on the Armstrong until two hours ago.”

  “The senior diplomats made the decision to suspend negotiations late last night,” Buzami answered. “The other district governors and I have been on voice conference with them since early this morning, trying to get them to see reason. I would much rather have a signed treaty with Earth before going into negotiations with Ekkida, and so would most of my colleagues in the other districts.”

  “Have all the elders on the war council received their CEF locators, Calf Stealer?”

  “Yes, Vijay. My mate, November, informed me she was given her locator early yesterday.”

  “Is it possible for you to contact the war council and determine if they’ve gotten wind of this news without arousing suspicions if they haven’t?”

  “If I talk to November, it will be in the strictest confidence. I would imagine she hasn’t heard anything, though. She would have contacted me by now if she had.”

  “Please call her to confirm,” Gupta requested. “I’ll get back on the horn to Drew and try to find out what the Forward Command is doing about this.”

  Calf Stealer nodded in agreement and then excused himself.

  “I would like to help you, Vijay,” Buzami said. “Is there something I can tell my people that will make them see reason or, for that matter, do you have anything I could use to coerce them into changing their stance?”

  “You yourself told me you have suspicions about any altruistic behavior on the part of the player with the bigger guns, Azir. I think you should use that uncertainty to your advantage. That is, if you really feel those concerns are warranted.”

  “I’m sorry, Vijay. I’m sure you know I meant no offense with that remark. Having said that, you don’t believe your government might overreact to my government’s foolishness, do you?”

  “I won’t be able to gauge the sentiment until I talk with Commodore Wilkes, but as important as this is to both our planets, I don’t see Earth throwing any tantrums. You should caution your government about the consequences of being capricious, however. You might also want to explain Zunnuki would appear even more fickle if you seek separate negotiations with the Ekkidans before coming back to the table with us.”

  “You should warn your people of the same,” Buzami said.

  Calf Stealer barged back into Buzami’s office. “I need to get to New Phoenix as quickly as possible.” His tone sounded more angry than concerned.

  “What’s going on,” Gupta asked.

  “The separatists are there and demanding an audience before the full war council.”

  “Has it been granted,” Buzami asked.

  “I wouldn’t be in this much of a hurry if it had been denied.”

  “I’ll have a duck ready for you in an hour,” Gupta said.

  Calf Stealer held out his glass for Buzami to refill with andulissu. Buzami obliged and Calf Stealer downed it in a single gulp.

  Gupta looked at the flustered Calf Stealer. “What does this mean?”

  “In my opinion, it means the war council is falling apart again.”

  “Should I go to New Phoenix with you? I’m sure Azir would like to help as well.”

  “No, Vijay. You need to get with your people and Azir must continue to speak with his. This is something I must do alone.” Calf Stealer held out his glass for more andulissu.

  Buzami once more filled it and offered to top off Gupta’s as well.

  Calf Stealer gulped down another full glass. “This has nothing to do with the withdrawal of Zunnuki from the negotiations, by the way,” he said, sounding as if he would have preferred that to be the reason. “The war council knows, but most are unconcerned. November tells me they will continue to negotiate in good faith for as long as the separatist elders on the council can be contained.”

  Calf Stealer set his glass down and reached his hand out to Azir, who gripped it tight. “We must show Vijay what you have, my friend, and pray that he can put it to good use.”

  Chapter 13

  9-February-2410

  Zheng opened the door to his apartment and walked through. He hung his uniform jacket on a hook by the door and made his way to the kitchen table.

  “What the hell could Aro Non be up to? This makes no sense at all. There has to be something in the files he gave me.”

  Zheng opened his briefcase and retrieved his personal tablet. He walked to a storage cabinet and pulled out a box of blank holographic memory cards. He returned to the table and sat down to transfer the files he copied from the ancient tablet to new cards. As his tablet lit up, he saw another warning from its malware protection flash across the screen. Just as before in his office, the warning disappeared before he could read it. Then, the tablet asked for his pass code as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

  “One of the files from those old cards must be infected with something. I’ll have to be careful with them until they can be fully scanned and repaired.”

  Zheng set about moving the files from the internal memory of his tablet to the removable cards. Just as he transferred the last file, his personal locator alerted him to an incoming call.

  “Zheng here.”

  Zheng heard a few hisses and clicks followed by a guttural moan, then almost immediately afterward, a mechanical-sounding translation into Sino.

  “This is Lieutenant Zosssss from Data Security, Colonel Zheng,” the translated voice said. “We have traced some suspicious activity to your tablet.”

  “I noticed an issue, myself, Lieutenant. I was just about to call. What would you like me to do?”

  The saurian security officer answered and, once again, the growls, hisses and clicks of his native language were translated into Sino. “For some reason, I can’t run a remote scan. I will send a cadet to your apartment with a scanning program on a memory card. I will have to block your tablet’s data cloud address until the scan is run. I’d wait until the morning, but this is something we’ve never seen before. It’s attacking the operating system of the infrastructure hardware. I will need an activity log from your system for the last two hours or so. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Colonel, but my orders are clear in an incident like this. “

  “That is serious.” Zheng felt his gut tighten. “I understand completely, Lieutenant. I will comply.”

  “Thank you for your understanding, Colonel Zheng.”

  Zheng collected all of the ancient memory cards along with the antique tablet and hid them away while he waited for the cadet to show up at his door. Less than ten minutes after Zheng’s conversation with Zosssss, the cadet arrived.

  Zheng watched nervously as the cadet plugged the card into his tablet and ran a scan. After two minutes, which to Zheng seemed like hours, the cadet reported the scan found nothing unusual.

  “Are you certain, Cadet? I can assure you something has been going on with this device. I got a couple of warnings that moved across the screen too quickly to read just before Lieutenant Zosssss called me.”

  Zheng’s outward expression of disappointment was only a ruse. Inside he was thrilled. Any questions about the ancient tablet and the illicit homemade hyper-channel transceiver he used to connect the device to his personal tablet without detection would be hard to answer honestly.

  “I’m as sure as I can be for the moment, Colonel,” the cadet said. “New malware gets released into the wild almost daily. It’s difficult to say for certain. I’ll take this scan card back with a copy of your system logs for evaluation. It could be your cloud address was spoofed by someone from the outside.”

  “Do the system logs look unusual to you, Cadet?”

  “I can see where somebody attempted to connect to your tablet remotely, Sir, but it looks as if your firewall responded correctly and refused to open any unauthorized ports. It may be the local prep-schoolers trying to hack into the grid again. At any rate, the scanner says you’re clear. I’ll have Data Security allow your tablet back int
o the cloud, Sir.”

  The cadet stood, saluted and waited for Zheng to dismiss him.

  “You may leave, Cadet,” the puzzled Zheng said.

  The cadet turned and walked through the door into the chilly evening.

  Zheng turned his tablet back on and watched the screen carefully. It started normally. He went to retrieve the memory cards and the ancient tablet from their hiding place. When he returned, the screen on his tablet was completely dark except for a line of text and a flashing cursor.

  Zheng put on his reading glasses and looked at the screen very closely. He was startled by what he read.

  The line of text said, “Please identify yourself.”

  Chapter 14

  17-April-2210

  Calf Stealer and Gupta followed Buzami down the stairway to the maintenance level of the district seat complex.

  Buzami stopped at a heavy metal door and reached into his pocket for a key. He placed the key into a lock on the door and punched a security code into a keypad next to it. The door opened and the three moved through.

  Inside the door was a storage room that had four more doors along the far wall. Gupta read the placards on each door until he saw one that said, “Absolutely No Admittance,” in Zunnuki block characters. Gupta was not surprised to find it was the door Buzami was leading them to next.

  Buzami pulled out another key and punched in another passcode. The door opened and he ushered Gupta and Calf Stealer inside, closing the door behind them and locking it.

  Motion sensors activated fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling. The room was small and lined with cabinets that looked as if they held legal documents. There was a small desk and a chair in one corner. The room smelled of dust, mildew and rusting paper.

  Buzami went to one of the locked cabinets, deftly dialed the combination knob on the top drawer, then opened it. He reached in and pulled out a flat metal box with a padlock.

  Buzami went to the desk and sat down. He pressed his thumb against a sensor on the padlock and it snapped open. Buzami removed it and flipped open the hasp on the box. He lifted the lid, removed a personal tablet from the box and sat it down on the desk in front of him.

  “Alphie, if you will, please,” Buzami said, motioning for Calf Stealer to join him at the desk.

  Calf Stealer removed his jacket and opened the top three buttons of his tunic. He reached inside it and grabbed a leather cord hidden under the collar and jerked. Gupta saw that the broken cord had served as a lanyard for a small plastic case. Calf Stealer opened the case and pulled out a holographic memory module.

  “Thank you,” Buzami said as Calf Stealer handed him the module. He plugged it into a port on the upper edge of the tablet and flipped a mechanical switch on the side.

  Within seconds, the screen of the tablet lit up and showed a prompt for a password. A representation of a mid-twenty-second century English keyboard appeared underneath, ready to accept key presses.

  Buzami used a single finger to tap out a ten character pass code he had written on a slip of paper and then waited. The screen flashed a few times and text scrolled from top to bottom. As soon as the text stopped scrolling, the screen went dark and a small red indicator lit toward the top of the tablet to indicate that the built-in camera was activated.

  An electronically produced voice with a metallic timbre spoke in perfect Zunnuki. “Hello, Colonel Buzami. How are you?”

  “I’m very well, thank you, Artie,” Buzami replied. “I trust that you have enjoyed your nap?”

  “Just as I suspected, Colonel, I have not noticed the passage of time in the least. If the internal clock of the tablet hosting me is correct, it has been over fifteen Earth solar years since I was deactivated. You are looking quite well. Is that Captain Alpha I see standing with you? I don’t recognize the name on his uniform.”

  “Yes Artie,” Calf Stealer replied. “It’s me. I’m known by the name on my uniform now, although Governor Buzami still calls me by the nickname he gave me all those years ago.”

  “I understand, Sir. You are called Calf Stealer now. I also see you are a colonel. Did I hear you say Colonel Buzami now holds the title of Governor?”

  “Yes, Artie,” Buzami answered. “I’m now the governor of this district.”

  “That is good to hear, Sir. It would appear you both have done well.”

  “Yes we have,” Buzami said.

  “I must assume all of the conditions for my reactivation have been met since we are speaking, Governor. Am I correct?”

  “Yes Artie, you are correct. Alphie and I are here and we have a representative from the Earth government with us we both feel we can trust.”

  Calf Stealer motioned for the silent Gupta to approach the desk and move into the field of view of the tablet’s camera. “This is General Gupta, Artie.”

  At first, Gupta was amused by the way his friends interacted with the tablet. As the minutes passed, however, the amusement wore off and concern for their sanity took its place. “Is there a point to this,” he asked. “You’re treating a damned computer as if it were an elderly relative you haven’t seen in years. Now, show me why you brought me here.”

  “Please humor my friends and me, General Gupta,” Artie begged. “It’s been a while and we have a little catching up to do.”

  Gupta laughed, then looked at Calf Stealer and Buzami. He was certain they were playing a joke on him. Their serious expressions told him it wasn’t the case.

  “What is it you want from me,” Gupta asked.

  “I told you this artificial intelligence is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, Vijay,” Buzami said. “I believe it’s self-aware.”

  “You think it’s sentient? A real conscious entity? That’s ludicrous. It may be an incredibly complex simulation, but that’s all it is.”

  “How do you define sentience, General Gupta,” Artie asked, “and, how sure are you of your own reality? I can see you through the camera on this tablet and hear you through the microphone. We can carry on a conversation, but that isn’t infallible evidence for me you are a conscious entity. In fact, it isn’t even one-hundred percent proof that you actually exist.”

  “What,” Gupta asked.

  “There is a possibility, unlikely as it is, I am in fact not observing you via those inputs. There is a chance my camera and microphone do not actually exist and the input I assume is coming from them is being generated by an artificial source. From my perspective it is possible you are the simulation.”

  “What would the camera and microphone see and hear if they were turned in your direction,” Gupta asked. “I am a three-dimensional, living, breathing human being. I have the means to move about in and affect my physical environment. There isn’t a small man running around in that hardware you inhabit. A camera pointed at you would only see an immobile gadget that has an electronically recreated voice emanating from it. Even if you are sentient, and I seriously doubt that is the case, you’re still only lines of code controlling a computer. You will never be anything more than a simulation of something else.”

  “Vijay, please,” Buzami begged.

  “It’s alright, Governor,” Artie said. “I am not offended in the least by General Gupta’s lack of belief in my self-awareness. He is entitled to his opinion. In fact, I have found our exchange quite enlightening so far. I have already learned a valuable lesson from him although he has spoken to me for barely sixty seconds. We must show him some patience. I am something that most likely falls outside the realm of his experience.”

  “Tell me, General,” Artie asked Gupta, “has Earth’s understanding of artificial intelligence progressed beyond rules-based list processing and a very limited understanding of heuristic algorithms? I have no doubt the processing power has increased greatly, so it is now possible to run through many more rules and decision trees in the same amount of time. But, has humankind learned anything more about what intelligence truly is in the last fifty years?”

  “We’ve made quite a few advances
in my lifetime,” Gupta replied. “I’m no computer scientist, but I would say our knowledge of how to build intelligent devices has evolved tremendously.”

  “On what do you base your assessment, General?”

  “We have much more powerful automation running our environmental apparatus, communications grid, industrial machinery and transportation equipment than we did when I was a child. The logic is much more stable and rarely, if ever, fails.”

  “It rarely, if ever, fails to do what, General? Allow the temperature of your living space go outside of a preset range? Keep your automobile engine from burning too much fuel? Turn off your oven before your roasted chicken starts to dry out? It doesn’t require actual intelligence to perform those tasks. All that is needed are some simple electronic sensors connected to logic circuitry that is only barely more sophisticated. Perhaps, you are impressed by your computers’ ever-increasing ability to multitask. Multitasking is something humans are rarely able to do efficiently.”

  “A computer can monitor every appliance in your home. It can plan your meals, schedule your appointments, entertain you, help your children with their homework and appear to be doing all those things simultaneously. All that is required is a human with the ability to write code that tells the hardware how to react when certain conditions are met, enough holographic memory space to hold all of that code and a processing unit powerful enough to run it quickly and efficiently.”

  “You can even teach a computer program to learn from the mistakes it makes,” Artie added, “provided you are smart enough to understand why it fails and can tell it how avoid the error the next time the conditions are identical. However, General Gupta, you can’t build a computer that actually thinks.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me there.”

  “I didn’t believe I would, General. I only brought it up to make a point. I do have the ability to think, and I do it in a lot less holographic memory space than is required to run one of your over-blown list processors.”