by Jack Thorlin
The Japanese roboticist shook her head, too tired to pretend she wasn’t worried about the Charlies still in the field. “They’re smart, but not smart enough yet. The Ushah figured out how to cut their puppet strings once, they’ll do it again.”
Yazov grimaced. “Perhaps. Casualties in war are inevitable, however. The most we can do is make sure they have the best odds possible of winning.”
Takagawa said with a glint of determination, “There must be more we can do.”
A voice behind her said, “Grant them free will.” Emma turned to see Peskov standing a few feet away, a gleam in his eye. “Allow them to fully decide their operational parameters and objectives. With a little additional development, their central processor will be able to identify and associate abstract ideas. Loyalty to their comrades, dedication to the defeat of the Ushah, desire to protect humanity—we can program those values into them and trust in their judgment to tailor their actions in support of those values.”
Her fatigued mind racing, Takagawa considered the idea. It was not as if she hadn’t seen where Project Charlie was heading. She had watched the video of Charlie III-6 carrying Charlie III-5 to the objective.
Even with the existing programming, Charlie was gradually becoming a creature of volition rather than an instrument instructed to perform certain tasks. With the Ushah computer technology spurring rapid advances, the Project Charlie engineers could pack enough power into the Charlie central processor to rival that of a chimp’s brain. Willpower and intelligence was the recipe of sapience.
Of course, computing power was only the beginning of the technical hurdles. “In order for the Charlies to prioritize abstract values, they would need to understand the values, accord them appropriate weight, and have some way of ordering them that made sense. No one even knows how humans do that,” Takagawa said.
Waving away the objection, Peskov said, “You’re looking at this the wrong way. We don’t have to fully understand humans in order to replicate human processes.”
The Russian hacker took off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt as he spoke. “Let’s be systematic about this. What are humans? First, we take in and recognize data from our senses. Second, we process it in our brain. Third, we generate options to respond to the incoming data based on our experiences. Fourth, we compare those options to the values hardwired into us by evolution—the need for food, rest, sex, whatever. Fifth, we act on the basis of the values. And sixth, we record the resulting pain or pleasure for use in future decisionmaking.”
“So how do we make Charlie into something more like a human?” He held up an index finger, then ticked off his subsequent points.
“We’ve already got sensors drawing in data, and a central processor powerful enough to sort it all out. Steps one and two are done.”
“For step three, we already have the Charlies developing experience and learning. The fifth and sixth steps are also already built in.”
“Step three is all we need to do: hardwire the values we want in the Charlies. And the best part is, we’ve already got a mechanism for doing that with the pain/pleasure system. Now we just weight values for loyalty to comrades, saving humans, whatever else we want. And boom, you’ve got Charlie IV—a silicon-based creature with as much free choice as any of us.”
Takagawa made herself look past the excitement of building a sapient mind. Over the past year, Peskov had become increasingly grandiose in his vision for the project. “Is this just another of your attempts to get to the Singularity?”
“Not at all,” Peskov said hurriedly. “The Singularity is when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, starts programming itself, and humans are quickly rendered obsolete. We’re not teaching Charlie how to come up with new ideas. We’re just giving him a way to decide how to apply the tactics and knowledge he already has.”
Peskov’s eyebrows bent as he pressed his case. “This isn’t some philosophical thought experiment. The Charlies were almost wiped out because they couldn’t adapt without us micromanaging them. Either we cut the umbilical cord to us, or the same thing will happen again someday.”
He’s right, Emma thought, but there was only one chance to do this right. Peskov was describing a quantum leap in the Charlies. Charlie I had been like a small bird going mindlessly through his subroutines. Charlie II had been a shark, programmed to perform a simple attack under a simple set of circumstances. Charlie III had been like a hunting dog, able to follow his masters’ will. If Peskov’s vision became reality, Charlie IV would be... what? A human-like servant? A slave?
“You know what Flower and the politicians will say about this idea,” Takagawa said, uncharacteristically evading the real issue.
“Yes, yes, they’ll say we’re inviting rebellion by the Charlies. We can avoid that easily enough by hard-wiring them not to harm humans. As long as we instill in them the core concept that they are not to harm humans, they will not rebel.”
Could she ask the Terran Alliance to trust the fate of humanity to the programming of an artificial mind? It wasn’t unprecedented, she thought. Computers had in some cases controlled the nuclear weapon stockpiles of the countries that had preceded the Terran Alliance. If those rulers had trusted computers with the most powerful force known to man, then Flower could trust her not to create a robot uprising.
Of course, politics wasn’t the central problem. The Charlies were her creation, but even she was beginning to lose a total understanding of how their processors made decisions. If the system were dramatically increased in complexity...
She was about to ask exactly how Peskov would accomplish a hard-wiring to ensure the Charlies could not disobey orders, but the thought was interrupted by Yazov saying, “Look, there’s the plane now.” Sure enough, a small transport aircraft was on final approach for a landing.
The Project Charlie personnel were allowed onto the tarmac to watch as the Charlies were removed from the aircraft. It turned out that the remains had been kept in a standard shipping container with a partition separating the two robots’ broken forms.
When Takagawa saw that her creations had been packed like broken down computers, she called the Arcani director in Mozambique and cursed him out for fifteen minutes. “They weren’t just pieces of equipment. They were thinking beings who sacrificed the only consciousness they knew because we ordered them to.” She developed the thought into an extended discussion of the contents of the Arcani director’s brain, which she speculated was mostly shit and undigested fat.
After she returned to her office, however, she sat in front of her fireplace and considered how the rest of the world viewed Charlie. He was a machine. They didn’t know that this particular machine carried one of its kin to an objective to give it a comforting final sense of honor and completion. What would it take for the world to acknowledge that Charlie was worthy of consideration, of love?
She picked up her phone and dialed an extension. “Peskov, come to my office. Let’s talk about Charlie IV.”
Part Three: Three Years After First Contact
Chapter 28: Joan
A twig snapped thirty meters to the east, and Joan stopped dead in her tracks. She couldn’t see the source of the noise through the darkness and thick foliage, but it had to be an Ushah, she decided. Nothing else likely to be in the jungle was big enough.
This was bad news. Her mission was vital to the war effort. Oh, no one called it a war, she thought, but she knew what it was.
The fourth Ushah colony on the mainland of Africa had swelled to over ten thousand inhabitants, and the Terran Alliance leadership was getting nervous that the Ushah were preparing for further expansion.
Once the Ushah had established their first colony on the mainland, they had kept pushing into the jungle, seeking more territory for their rapidly expanding population. Estimates for the total Ushah population on Madagascar and the coast of Africa ranged from 600,000 to 900,000. Biologists guessed that the Ushah were artificially developing offspring in large numbers
with the goal of rapidly reconstituting their species.
The Terran Alliance and the Ushah did not exchange ambassadors or any regular communication, but the Ushah quietly kept pushing their boundaries back farther and farther, sending new colonists to build homes away from the beachhead they had negotiated with Safety Minister Redfeather.
The Terran Alliance in turn sent the Arcani to monitor Ushah expeditions into the jungle. When simple monitoring had no effect, Redfeather had ordered the Arcani to ask any Ushah they saw more than a kilometer inland from the beaches what they were doing, hoping to shame the Ushah into ceasing their expansion. That effort had ended when the number of Arcani who had disappeared on such patrols reached thirty.
Joan had been amused when she heard that story. The idea of an Ushah soldier being shamed into abandoning land ran contrary to everything she had learned about the reptilians.
After six months on station, she knew the different castes of the Ushah and their personalities. She knew that the soldiers were brave to a fault, bound by a fierce desire to please their superiors. She knew that the Ushah engineer, the most basic form of worker, could turn an acre of forest into a plowed field for crops in about two hours.
Four months ago, one of the Ushah leader subspecies had even visited an area Joan had under surveillance. Tall and thin for an Ushah, he had stood five and a half feet tall, and gazed out at the brush without seeing Joan.
In the raspy language of the Ushah, he had told his assistant, a younger member of the leadership caste, that the site would be excellent for a new city. Sure enough, the engineering class had moved in and thrown up walls, buildings, and an extensive network of underground dwellings. She could tell from the excess earth dumped outside of the settlement that the space underground must have been almost twice as large as what was on the surface.
The Terran Alliance had decided that finding out what the Ushah were up to was worth the risk of Joan’s death or capture and, in a cold, dispassionate way, Joan agreed. The Ushah were a growing threat, and someone was going to have to take some risks at some point to figure out what the hell they were up to.
After months of surveillance, Joan was now tasked with getting a closer look at the inside of the Ushah compound and planting a variety of intelligence-gathering devices. No one knew this particular installation better than she did, and she had spent two weeks gaining new insight into Ushah security through a variety of tests devised by her friend Viktor Yazov.
Two days ago, she had released a hungry warthog outside of the Ushah base. The animal had been drawn to the smell of cooked meat from the Ushah residences and came running toward the two massive buildings behind the colony’s transparent airtight dome. The warthog didn’t trigger any landmines or the like, but he did set off an alarm when he got to the entryway of the building. A dozen Ushah soldiers had come from both buildings to see what was the matter. They killed the warthog with fire from their rail guns.
The lesson was clear: don’t approach the door, Joan thought.
She was only about fifty yards from the edge of the land the Ushah had cleared around the colony’s dome when an Ushah scout-soldier had cracked the twig. Now she had a decision to make. Take out the scout and risk alerting the Ushah to her presence, or let him go and hope he didn’t see and kill her.
Kill the scout, she thought decisively. She had killed scouts before, and they didn’t seem to be wired with any sort of device that would immediately notify the Ushah of their fate.
Already in a crouch, she stepped forward carefully over the damp ground. It had rained a few hours ago, a typical late afternoon rainstorm for this part of the world. The Ushah had excellent vision, particularly at night, but their hearing was slightly worse than that of humans.
For this operation, she carried a silenced submachine gun, but she knew that such weapons were only “silent” in a relative sense. Their noise would carry, particularly in the still night air, and any other Ushah soldiers in the area might hear and make her situation much more complicated.
No, this was a job for her blade, a foot-long spike designed to penetrate whatever armor the Ushah might possess. The diamond tip was sharp enough to slice into solid stone, and she had seen its power repeatedly in training. Now she gripped it in her right hand and walked briskly through the underbrush.
She couldn’t see the Ushah soldier. No fear, Joan told herself. Let the green bloods fear. She was a professional. The Ushah had given away his position when he stepped on that twig, and not much time had elapsed since then. He couldn’t have gone far.
And suddenly, there he was, facing away from her just three meters distant.
Without hesitation, Joan sprang forward, and the soldier had just enough time to turn before she thrust her spike through his head, which was conveniently roughly aligned with the height of her shoulder. The green-blood didn’t make a sound. She knew from experience that the Ushah brain was a delicate thing, and if you tore into it fast enough, the Ushah soldiers dropped almost before you knew you had killed them.
Without hesitation, she picked up the body and moved it into the thickest brush she could find. That simple measure could double or triple the amount of time it would take the Ushah to find the body and figure out what had happened.
She moved on toward the dome, keeping low and swiveling her head constantly to see any signs of guards in the area. The warthog hadn’t set off any alarms until he got right up to the door, she reminded herself. So, don’t go to the door.
The roughly circular dome was a mile in radius, and she approached it as far from any entrance as possible. There were four such entrances evenly spaced along the periphery, so she was over half a mile from the nearest entrance. This part of the mission had been anticipated at headquarters, and Yazov had come up with a solution.
Joan touched the dome to confirm what the satellite intelligence had guessed—that the dome was made of a sort of fabric-like glass material. She withdrew a diamond-tipped knife from a holster on her chest. In one swift motion, she sliced a five-foot gash in the material. She could detect the outrush of air as the oxygen-enriched atmosphere inside rushed out where the cut had been made.
That would set off an alarm of some kind within the Ushah complex, she was certain. She hoped it would be in the atmospheric engineering section, not the security department.
As quickly as possible, she stepped through the ripped section. Once on the other side, she applied a layer of epoxy along the cut. The entire process took no more than five seconds.
The epoxy might not last very long, she thought, but it would create an airtight seal. Hopefully, whatever alarm indicating a rupture in the dome would go off automatically once the airtight membrane had been resealed. Or maybe the repair crew would just take their time getting to it. She didn’t need the epoxy to buy her much time; she planned on being inside the dome no more than a minute.
Only now did she turn to look inside the dome. She was facing a wall no more than four feet in front of her face. Or, as she realized after a moment of examination, she was facing the slightly curved side of a large building, perhaps a quarter of a mile long and a hundred feet high. Was this a residence? Would there be electronics here for her to bug?
There could be no guidance while on the mission, she knew. If she transmitted a question, the Ushah would detect it and hunt her down. She had to decide for herself if she wanted to deploy her spying gadgets here or somewhere else in the Ushah colony.
From where she stood, it looked like there were maybe three other buildings of similar size. There didn’t appear to be any wires or any obvious signs of electronics on the other buildings or on the one directly in front of her.
There was no time to enter each building. She decided this one would have to do. From her backpack, she retrieved an insect-like drone about six inches long and four inches wide, with six thin metallic legs. She set it on the building, and it instantly took off, crawling up to the roof. After placing four more bugs that scurried up to the roof,
she decided her mission was accomplished.
She moved a few feet away from where she had entered the dome and cut a new slit to make her way out, figuring that if she cut away the epoxy from the first slit, it would be hard to seal it up again from the other side. Within thirty seconds, she was back outside the dome and the second slit had been resealed. She ran off in a low crouch, and she was quickly back into the jungle.
After she had gone a few hundred meters and had stopped to look for Ushah soldiers, she radioed into Houston. “Yazov, Joan here, mission accomplished, returning to Base Delta.”
She received the response: “Acknowledged, Joan. Well done. Yazov out.”
A moment of satisfaction, of joy. She knew that her forebears would have updated a variable in their central registries for such an accomplishment. They would have been able to literally tally the incremental happiness their achievement had brought.
Joan’s processor was more subtle than that. The variable for satisfaction of a mission accomplished was still there, of course, but maximization of that variable was no longer the sole objective for a Charlie. She couldn’t even read the variable’s value.
