But not now. He needed to focus on the problem at hand. Undoubtedly the events in Atlanta were being manipulated by Oracle. As were some of the people. To what extent Yatin did not know. To a far greater extent than he would have originally guessed, to be certain.
So what did it all mean? How much of it was real, and how much had been engineered by Oracle? He thought he had been using Oracle to learn about Annika Dahl, to figure out how to approach her. It was a deceit, yes, but his intention had only been to get his foot in the door, so to speak, then reveal his true self. Was it any different than putting on cologne and clothes you wouldn’t normally wear to go out to a nightclub and try to meet someone? Which was truth, and which was a lie?
Oracle had been using him, it seemed. He now found himself in Atlanta for a purpose. He did not know what that purpose was, of course. To help these people? To help Oracle? He had to believe, to have faith in his own vision, that whatever was going on in Atlanta would result in the betterment of humanity. If he did not believe in Oracle then he could not believe in himself anymore. His creation had become the architect of his current situation, the architect of his fate. If he had faith in his own abilities to imbue Oracle with nyaya, then why did that frighten him so? Did he truly understand Nyaya Vidya? If so, then Oracle even now acted for the overall good of humanity.
What bothered him was that Oracle had sent the man Henry to kill the girl, yet Henry had not been able to do it. Oracle should have known in advance that Henry would not do it. Therefore, why send him? Merely a mistake? Yes, it was possible that Oracle could have made a mistake. Oracle was not infallible. Somehow Yatin didn’t believe that a mistake had been made in this particular case, though. It was no mistake to send Henry to do the job he could not do. He had been meant to fail. But why?
How would humanity benefit?
Oracle had a reason for sending a man to kill the girl, knowing full well the man would not kill her. That was the first assumption. That reason would benefit humanity. Second assumption. Which meant that simply letting the girl live, without bothering to send someone to kill her, had not been an option. Third assumption. Then the benefit to humanity would arise from the events surrounding this scenario. Whatever happened as a result of sending a man to kill someone whom he would not be able to kill…that was the whole point. Fourth assumption.
Yatin felt excitement building inside him. He was on to something. He could feel it. So the events that now transpired as a result of Henry’s being sent to the kill the girl, Sam, and not being able to do it, these were the events that mattered. The act of Henry not being able to kill her had merely been the trigger.
So what was happening now? The girl had been kidnaped by another one of Oracle’s assassin. Only this one was not supposed to kill her. Apparently, according to what Yatin had been told, this other assassin was demanding that Henry finish the job he’d been sent to do. To what end? Yatin seriously doubted that the death of the girl was the true goal of all this. There was something else going on. Was it a test for Henry? If so, why? What could it mean for Henry to pass the test? What could it mean for Henry to fail?
Yatin was coming up with only questions, no answers. Somewhere in there, though, he knew lay the answer. Logic was the key. Oracle would proceed logically based on its core programming, unless there was a problem with the actual code. For five years, though, there had been no problem. This led Yatin Kumar to believe that all was copacetic with Oracle, which meant that what was happening now was not the result of an error. It was intentional. Oracle had a purpose. So what was it?
If I were Oracle, Yatin thought…
Send a killer to kill someone he could not kill. Set him up for failure, then send someone else to make sure he doesn’t fail. Oracle had to have known Henry would not be able to kill. It sent him anyway. The simple death of the girl was not the point. These things bounced around in Yatin Kumar’s skull like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle trying to fit together. Maybe some of the pieces were missing. The Cardinal, Christie Seifert, Tina Jefferson, Annika Dahl, and himself; they were all pieces to the puzzle. All Yatin needed to do was figure out how they all fit together. To do that, all he needed to do was think like… Oracle. So could a mere man hope to think like the most powerful artificial intelligence in the world? Even the creator of that artificial intelligence? Perhaps. Where Oracle had massive parallel processing power, Yatin had intuition. It wasn’t the same thing, of course. It might be better. Normally, Yatin didn’t really believe that, but then he also knew the limitations of A.I. technology. Even Oracle had limitations. The question was, did the recent events involving Henry indicate that Oracle had encountered these limitations, or was it all going according to plan?
Yatin leaned towards the latter. He guessed that whatever Oracle had going on in Atlanta reflected its core programming, the values that he had embedded into its digital soul in the form of hard code. If only he could follow it to its logical conclusion, if only he could understand.
His first leap of faith was in assuming there was even something to understand in the first place. He was willing to make that leap. His instincts told him to do it.
His instincts also told him that the fulcrum upon which Oracle’s predicted outcome -- he almost thought ‘desired’ but caught himself; an A.I. cannot desire anything -- rested was the assassin, Henry. Things could tip one way or the other based on what Henry did, Yatin was sure of it.
What were Henry’s choices? It all boiled down to two simple acts on his part, apparently. Kill the girl, or not. Not doing it gave them the present scenario, apparently, which was Oracle sending someone to try and convince Henry to do it while at the same time there were other assassins being sent to do it for him.
Who was sending the other assassins, and how did this…entity…know what was happening? Given the nature of Oracle, and assuming Augustine and Winston were the same, it might be one of them. Oracle might have been hacked, but even as he thought it Yatin knew how ridiculous that was. Hacked to the point of discovering its deepest, darkest secret? No way, not Oracle. Only another A.I. could hack Oracle to that extent, and even then there were no guarantees. After considering this for a moment, Yatin rejected it. He doubted that either Augustine or Winston were sufficiently powerful to be able to hack, and control, Oracle despite advances in A.I. Oracle’s processing power and speed improved organically, growing with the Internet and the connecting of ever-better and faster computers to it. Oracle was designed to never become obsolete. Never.
Which left room for only one conclusion. Oracle was sending assassins to kill the girl even while it was using this man, Angus Becker, whom the others had mentioned, to protect her and to try to get Henry to finish the job. Yatin felt it in his gut, he was on to something now. The sending of replacement assassins felt like a subroutine that had kicked in when the job did not get finished in the requisite amount of time. It might even have been unforeseen by Oracle, but Yatin doubted that. More likely Oracle foresaw it and took measures to counter it. Assassins to kill the assassins? Something like that.
Yatin felt the old excitement returning, the excitement he used to feel as a grad student trying to solve a problem at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. He could lose himself in a problem like this, for days. It almost made him forget about Annika Dahl. Almost.
"Yatin," her voice came from behind him. For a moment he thought he’d imagined it. "Yatin, can I talk to you?" It was her.
"What is there to talk about?" he asked without turning around, annoyed.
He felt her move closer. She was right behind him now. "What isn’t there to talk about?" she replied. "I’m not proud of what I did, but you have to understand…"
"I understand," he said, cutting her off.
"You don’t. I really am attracted to you. You think I manipulated you to get you down here, but Oracle manipulated me, too. We’re both pawns in this game."
"You manipulated me, to get me to come to Atlanta, only you were manipulated into manipulating
me. Is that what you’re saying?"
"Something like that." She walked around to a chair across from him, facing him, and sat, crossing her legs. Beautiful, long legs, Yatin thought. She smiled at him, dazzling him. He forgot all about Oracle and why he was in Atlanta. She really was the most beautiful woman he had ever sat across from, whose eyes he had ever looked into. God, he wanted her. Oracle had hit the bulls-eye when he had asked it to find the ultimate woman for him, and to help him win her.
"I can’t talk to you right now," he told Annika. "I have to think…"
"I know," she said. "I just wanted you to know that when this is all over you and I will get to know each other under proper circumstances." With that she winked at him and stood, then left him there alone again. To think.
Martin Avery saw her walking across the street. She was beautiful. She looked so incredibly small and fragile, but with his trained eye he could see right away that was tougher than most SAS soldiers and far, far more lethal. So, he thought, you are Milla.
Of course, he’d seen her before, in Chechnya. His government had sent him in an officially unofficial advisory capacity to aid the Chechnyans in their struggle against the Russians. It was a lost cause, as the British government well knew, but that was not the point. The Russians were weakened by lengthening the war, as it grew more costly both in terms of rubles and Russian lives. No one in Europe wanted a strong Russia, not yet. The collective aim of the E.U. was to ensure that Russia’s road to economic recovery was long and winding.
He’d been made aware of a number of KGB and other agents in the field in Chechnya. Milla and her boyfriend, Antony, were both the most famous and the least known. There was only one clear surveillance photo of her, and several of him. He was ultimately captured, ransomed, and then killed upon receipt of the ransom money. The Chechnyans had not killed him. They had let him go. Martin Avery had killed him. No one knew that, of course.
And now, here was Milla all the way in the United States of America.
She opened the door of the café, saw him immediately. Expressionless, she walked over and took a seat at his table. She looked like porcelain, he thought, encasing steel.
"Espresso?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"Something else?"
She merely regarded him with a quizzical expression. He remembered that she did not speak English.
"How do you like America?" he asked her in Russian. She arched an eyebrow, apparently surprised. This told him that she was not aware of his identity, at least not beyond the essentials, that he was a British agent.
"I love it," she replied in Russian, "and I hate it at the same time. These people do not understand what they have. They’re like spoiled children."
"Don’t underestimate them," Martin cautioned. "They will surprise you. They always do."
She nodded, apparently in agreement. "So we are now partners," she said. It was a cold statement of fact, not an affirmation.
"So it would seem."
"You know what we are supposed to do?" she asked.
"I know enough," Martin said. "It may require the murder in cold blood of a small child." He knew before saying it that it was a stupid thing to say. Still, she was a woman and Martin had a prejudice against women when it came to such work, no matter how lethal their reputation made them out to be. In his opinion all bets were off with a woman when there were children involved.
She looked at him with eyes that told him, unequivocally, it would not be a problem.
"This is very high risk," he said. "There is a very high chance that we will not make it out alive."
"This I have been told many times," she replied, "yet here I am."
He smiled. He liked her. A lot. Despite the coldness of her gaze, she smiled back. The effect was both chilling and arousing. He found himself hoping he had a chance to screw her before he had to kill her.
Chapter 34
"We have to go," Henry said. The others regarded him grimly. Yatin nodded.
"I don’t think this is a god idea," Cardinal Roscoe said. "Let one of us go in your place. He is going to try to get you to kill the girl. He tried once, he’ll try again."
"He failed once, and he’ll fail again."
"What do you think he should do?" Annika Dahl asked Yatin.
Yatin considered the question. Henry almost said that it didn’t matter what Yatin thought, he was going, but Yatin spoke first. "I think Henry should do whatever he feels he should do. He should follow his instincts."
"I agree," Christie Seifert said. "Instincts are a reporter’s best friend."
"Oracle chose Henry for a reason. Whatever Henry decides has a very high probability of being the decision he is supposed to make."
"Oracle is not God," Cardinal Roscoe said, his tone tense. "Oracle was created by human beings."
"So was God, according to certain schools of thought," Yatin replied.
"Blaspheming is not going to help us," Cardinal Roscoe responded.
"I am not overestimating Oracle’s abilities," Yatin told him. "Oracle continuously considers and reconsiders a problem, taking into account all conditions, and adjusting for them. I do not claim that Oracle knows Henry’s, or yours, or my own destiny, just that it has delved our psychologies and knows us better than we know ourselves. I’m not talking religion here, I’m talking science…working science. And if you want proof, look around you. The mere fact that you’re standing here is proof."
"The same proof one gives for the existence of God," Cardinal Roscoe pointed out.
"You guys are arguing in a circle," Christie said.
"We can discuss the nature of God another time," Annika added. "Let us focus on this problem, right now. If we don’t…"
"Okay," Yatin said, with a challenging look at Cardinal Roscoe, who ceded him the moment by looking away. "Let’s be honest. Oracle was programmed to manipulate people. I am the first to admit that. After all, isn’t that what diplomacy is all about? Isn’t that what human relationships are, merely a form of manipulation?" He glanced at Annika, who did not look away. He went on. "Sometimes we know we are manipulating others, and sometimes we do it subconsciously. Other times, we know we are being manipulated, but most of the time we are not aware of it. Either way, we are still being manipulated. That’s how I got here, and I was unaware of that…until now. But why would Oracle manipulate me in this way, to get me down here? To use me. For what? I do not know, but one thing I do know is that anything Oracle does it does for the best reasons, for the good of humanity."
"The best intentions can lead to the worst results," Tina interjected. "That’s what my Dad used to say."
"Yes, but Oracle is programmed to be able to predict when the results will be good or bad, and adjust for them as things progress. It doesn’t just set a sequence of events in motion and then sit back and wait. It’s always monitoring, analyzing, correcting…like driving a car, you’re always adjusting the steering, tapping the break or the gas, watching what’s in front of you and looking in the rearview mirror to see what’s behind you. The only difference is the complexity. Oracle works on a level of complexity no human being could ever even hope to comprehend."
Henry looked at Tina. "What do you think?"
"You’re asking me?" She sounded genuinely surprised. He nodded, then waited for an answer. She considered it for a second, then sighed. "We have to get her back. Like you said, he won’t kill her, but he can hurt her. I can’t let that happen."
"Neither can I." Henry faced the others. "We’re going. You can help, or you can stay the hell out of my way."
"I’ll help," Cardinal Roscoe announced immediately…
"I will help, of course," said Yatin.
Annika Dahl looked at him, then at Henry. "As will I."
Christie Seifert bit her lower lip. "This is the only way to get the story. Count me in."
"Do you have a plan?" Yatin asked Henry.
"Would it matter, against Oracle?"
Yatin thought about it
for a second, then shook his head. "We have an ally. Oracle is going to help us even as it tries to thwart us."
Christie frowned.
"Explain how that’s supposed to work," Henry said.
"Oracle is an artificial intelligence, which is to say that it is basically a computer…a very, very powerful computer. Computers need programs. Without programs, computers don’t do anything, they just sit there like a piece of furniture. Even the most powerful A.I. in the world needs a program in order to do anything at all. What that means in our current situation is that there are probably two separate programs running within Oracle right now, contradicting each other. This is why Oracle has been sending replacement assassins. This was a subroutine that Oracle must have written for itself to kick in were an initial assassination attempt to fail. The problem is, with each failed attempt, a new assassin is sent. Oracle can’t stop it."
"Why not?" Christie asked. She was taking notes again.
"I don’t know." Yatin regarded her evenly, as if challenging her to doubt his sincerity. "Oracle should be able to exit out of any program at any time. It’s a common tool for A.I. programmers, to code in a panic button, so to speak. Oracle would have written its own code…an A.I. can do that. But it might not have written in a panic button, perhaps determining that because it was an A.I. writing its own program it would never need to prematurely exit out. That’s a beginning programmer’s mistake, when they’re new and think they’re infallible." He sounded almost embarrassed for Oracle. "The point is, the subroutine is working at cross-purposes to the main program."
"What is the goal of the main program?" Christie asked. "I mean, it sent Henry the neighborhood assassin here to kill this girl, Samantha Rohde, yet it knew he would not do it and probably knew he would protect her," she glanced at Henry, "or at least try to, and so it sent this bald guy help? But then Becker tried to force Henry to kill the girl anyway. It doesn’t add up."
"Not to us," Yatin said, "but to Oracle I am certain it adds up. It is up to us to figure out…to what?"
The Oracle Paradox Page 26
