by Jack Thorlin
She inserted a data card into a slot in one of the workstations. Project Charlie, mostly Dmitry Peskov, had an intimate knowledge of Ushah programming from years of study. Peskov had written this program for use in the bug-planting operation, but it would probably work just as well now.
The program was very simple. The environmental control software was designed to take in data from sensors all around the bubble so that it could detect any breaches immediately. Instead of getting that data from the sensors, however, the control software would now retrieve data directly from the data card. That data would be completely normal regardless of whatever breaches might actually occur.
“Initiate breach,” Joan radioed back simply to her comrades.
The seventeen Charlies outside the bubble took the message. They closed on the bubble and used their Ascalons to tear entry holes. They sealed the holes after they were through. After all, Art thought, they’d almost certainly be taking prisoners today, and there was no reason to risk valuable prisoners because of a loss in heat or oxygen density.
Once inside the colony, the Charlies split up into five groups. Four groups of two Charlies each headed to each of the four exits. There were a few guards in close proximity to each exit, and about ten on their way to the northern entrance to see what had happened to the guards sent to investigate the broken camera outside the airlock. Joan had killed those guards, of course, and the Ushah soldiers had just enough time to discover that fact before Sun (Tzu) and Indira (Gandhi) ambushed the group and dispatched them with grenades and .50 caliber rifle fire.
The remaining eight Charlies converged on the security center from eight different directions. Even if the Charlies had not had a map, stairs were easy to find. The Ushah had very logically put in dozens of wide staircases throughout the colony, making vertical movement as efficient as possible in the event of an emergency.
The consequence of this design decision was that there was no one chokepoint where Ushah defenders could mount an organized defense. Any particularly well-defended staircase could be easily bypassed by using a different staircase.
George had explained the plan to Art, who had appreciated the cleverness. It also showed Art just how far George had come in his understanding of biological psychology.
To the biological mind of the Ushah, attack meant concentration on a single point because that was how a biological mind evolved. Organized war had from the very beginning required coordination and discipline. For biological beings with limited communication methods and the tendency to panic, the various soldiers needed to stick together to receive commands aurally and encourage each other.
As communications and training improved and history progressed, mobs of men became columns of men, which became lines of men, which became dispersed clusters of men, which became even more dispersed clusters. George assumed that the Ushah had gone through a similar evolution, and Art considered that any biological being would have to do likewise.
The Charlies had essentially perfected communications and training. They could instantly transmit and process information to perfectly complement each other’s actions, even if they were hundreds of miles apart. And so they attacked the security center from all directions, making coherent defense impossible.
The plan was to engage only Ushah soldiers, though that plan was complicated by the fact that the soldiers wouldn’t be wearing their distinctive thermal suits and pressure masks inside of the colony. The Ushah soldiers were on average ten inches taller than, say, a scientist/engineer, but it could be difficult to estimate height perfectly on the run.
A number of Ushah had come out of their group dwellings to see what was happening, and the sound of gunfire and grenade explosions had now alerted everyone in the colony that an attack was underway. Some innocent Ushah had already been cut down by the Charlies because of mistaken identification. Those losses did trouble the Charlies, but only because their mission was to secure as many prisoners as possible, and dead Ushah could tell no tales.
Art was proceeding down past the third sublevel toward the security center when two Ushah guards emerged from a large room into the hallway 124 meters in front of him. They were followed by an Ushah taller than a scientist/engineer and too short to be a soldier. Art identified a classic escort pattern as they turned to run toward a staircase
The deductive part of Art’s processor went to work. There were a few Ushah castes that fit the height range: maintenance personnel, artists, and diplomat/leaders. The only one of those castes likely to warrant an escort was the last.
Art judged that a diplomat/leader would be important enough to divert temporarily from his course for. The Ushah, missing their pressure suits, showed up easily on infrared scanners, and in the chaos, the enemy soldiers had not noticed Art down the street.
While a human might have been breathing hard from the run, Art was completely ready to aim and fire an accurate shot. He brought his rifle up smoothly and killed first one, then the other of the soldier escorts. The diplomat/leader spun around clumsily to see what had happened, but the movement was so jerky that she fell to the ground.
She did not stay there long. Horrified by the spilled blood and brain matter of her guards, she sprang to her feet and took off running.
Art easily caught up to the fleeing Ushah diplomat/leader and grabbed her strongly by the shoulder, yanking her to a halt. The resistance immediately went out of the Ushah, who froze in terror, waiting to be killed by this hulking electronic monstrosity.
Art wanted to know her name to cross-reference with a list of the Ushah higher-ups, but his primary mission remained incomplete.
He deftly affixed a pair of plastic handcuffs to keep the Ushah from causing him too much trouble, tucked her under his left arm, and resumed the run to the security center.
He needn’t have bothered. By the time he arrived, the battle was over. George greeted him just inside the security center, a hundred yard square room near the center of the sixth sublevel.
“All resistance eliminated at the security center,” George said. Art could see from his internal map of the area that the other Charlies were already expanding the sphere of control outward, patrolling for stray Ushah soldiers.
“Who are you carrying?” George asked. The Ushah was not squirming anymore, but simply held her head up every few seconds to take in what was happening.
“A diplomat/leader,” Art answered. He set her down, and though she seemed to realize she was out of immediate danger, she cowered before the Charlies. Switching to Ushah, Art asked, “What is your name?”
A raspy voice answered, “I am Shathara, governor of the Ashterha Colony.”
A valuable prisoner indeed, Art thought, knowing that George would be thinking the same thing.
Characteristically, George had a plan for this contingency. “Governor Shathara, I request that you order your subjects to return to their homes and put on their oxygen masks and thermal suits. You and your subjects have two hours to vacate this colony.”
“What will you do then, toy?” she asked defiantly, using the Ushah pejorative idiom for the Charlies.
George was incapable of lending too much drama to his response. “We will destroy your colony.”
“But what of the agreement?” the governor asked hotly.
“What agreement?” George asked in puzzlement.
The governor nearly shouted, “The one we negotiated when your envoys visited us several months ago!”
Chapter 33: Takagawa
“What is happening?!” First Representative Flower asked angrily. “Why are the Charlies attacking Colony 4?”
The satellites had, of course, detected the movement of seventeen Charlies south, opposite the direction where they had been ordered to go in order to facilitate the evacuation order. Emma had been in the control center when it had all started, had seen the disbelieving faces of the technicians whose repeated calls to the Charlies went unanswered. She had even tried personally issuing the orders, but she too had fai
led. The Charlies even ignored Yazov, the trainer who had taught them how to fight.
There was no hiding the truth from Flower. Within minutes of the mutiny, she had called.
Takagawa answered, “Seventeen of the Charlies stationed at Base Delta have ignored orders to withdraw.”
“You told me they could never disobey a direct order!” Flower shouted through the video call.
“I thought they couldn’t,” Takagawa said, trying to keep her voice steady. “I personally programmed that prohibition into the higher brain function of the Charlie IV.”
“Well, you didn’t do a very good job,” Flower said with agitation. “Do you have a plan to reassert control before the Charlies murder an entire colony of Ushah?”
“We can only issue the deactivation order through an encrypted electronic message. The Charlies have deactivated their receivers for such messages, something they were enabled to do under their power management protocols.”
“I don’t care about these details, I just want to know if you can fix the damn problem!” Flower yelled.
“We don’t have a solution yet. We’re working on it,” was the best Takagawa could manage.
Flower said angrily, “Call me when you’ve got something.” The connection cut off. Takagawa terminated the call from her workstation in the Project Charlie control room.
At her side, Jackson asked quietly, “Do we have any idea what went wrong?”
“We know where it started,” Yazov said. “I’ve looked at the logs. All of the Charlies heading south spoke to Art before they began heading south.”
Jackson frowned, trying to remember Art’s full name. He did not spend as much time evaluating individual Charlies. “Art...”
Yazov’s craggy features contorted in a pained expression. “Spartacus. We should have seen it coming.”
Takagawa thought that she had not seen it coming at all, that before today she would have bet her life that the Charlies couldn’t disobey orders. “I don’t know.”
She sat at the nearest workstation and pulled up the generic Charlie IV build, the root code that went into the Charlie IVs before their training started. The obvious place to start her investigation was the Asimov Protocols.
Takagawa had learned at an early age about Isaac Asimov, the patron saint of robotics. The 20th century author had put forward the Three Laws of Robotics, the critical safety features that would allow robots to faithfully serve humanity.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Takagawa had programmed the Three Laws into the Charlies herself in a portion of the central processor code she had dubbed the Asimov Protocols. However, trying to actually program the Protocols revealed that Asimov’s laws were impossibly vague and impractical.
The first law prohibited allowing harm to come to humans, but every battlefield decision carried with it the eventual possibility of human harm. A tactical retreat could require abandoning a human village in order to save a city, for example.
Even a direct prohibition on harming humans was too restrictive. The Ushah could start capturing Arcani and marching them in front of every patrol to prevent the Charlies from doing anything to stop the Ushah and thereby save more human lives.
Thus, when the time came to implement the first law, Takagawa had simply assigned human life a high value in the calculus of costs and benefits. That was enough to skew Charlie decisionmaking away from harming humans in all but the most extreme circumstances.
The second law, requiring robot obedience to human commands, was the most relevant to the current situation, and the easiest to implement. Under Emma’s implementation of the second law, the Charlies were only directly required to obey orders from the leaders of Project Charlie (Yazov, Jackson, and Takagawa) or the First Representative of the Terran Alliance.
She had first programmed the Asimov Protocols into Charlie III, the first robot with a sufficiently advanced mind to need them. She had also examined the Charlie IV software during development to ensure that the laws had been transferred over. But she wasn’t the only programmer with access to the Protocols.
She pulled up the Asimov Protocols now and began scrutinizing the second law coding. At first, it looked just as she remembered, but when she looked more closely, she felt a primal sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.
The subroutine was mislabeled.
AsimovLaw2.do had been altered to AsiwovLaw2.do.
But the subroutines calling on AsimovLaw2.do had still compiled and run properly! Takagawa raged internally. The machine that translated her code into the literal instructions to the machine itself had not flagged the typo, meaning that the correct AsimovLaw2.do still had to exist somewhere.
She ran a new search across the entire Charlie IV build programming, looking for AsimovLaw2.do. Buried in a subroutine of the elbow flexion control, she found what she was looking for.
The code there instructed the Charlies to obey orders given by Project Charlie leadership or the First Representative unless the estimated impact to Deep Satisfaction was a greater than 50 percent or less than 1 percent in magnitude, in which case the order could be ignored. Ignoring the order would cause a 30 percent decline in Deep Satisfaction, but it could be done.
“Shit,” Emma muttered, digesting the change. The Charlies would only disobey an order if it seemed grossly incorrect or was completely trivial. Someone had thought this through, burying the vital, massive change to the Charlie programming somewhere no one would ever find it unless they knew exactly what they were looking for.
Who could have done it? The answer was obvious and immediate.
As the director of Project Charlie, she had overseen and helped program thousands of subroutines, everything from spatial reasoning to energy management. Her knowledge of the program was comprehensive, and in many areas deep. But there were inevitably specialists who had plumbed the depths of their given field more than she had. When it came to the most profound, bedrock understanding of the central processor, one programmer stood out.
She picked up a phone and called an office in the programming lab. “Get into the operations center immediately,” she said when the line was picked up.
A minute and a half later, the short, scrawny, pale figure with a mop of brown hair and thick glasses ambled in. “Peskov, you have thirty seconds to explain this,” Takagawa said, pointing at the satellite feed showing the Charlies progress toward Colony 4, “before I have you arrested for sabotage.”
Dmitry Peskov, the former hacker, did not betray any sense of nervousness. He made no pretense of innocence. “You wanted your children to be able to function autonomously. We had to cut the umbilical cord.”
“They can function autonomously without ignoring Asimov’s second goddamn law!” she shouted.
Peskov wasn’t fazed. “I didn’t think you wanted me to turn them into a permanent, unthinking slave class.”
“This isn’t some bullshit philosophy argument, Dmitry,” Takagawa said with an icy cold tone. “When Flower asks me if I can assure her the robots won’t turn against us, what should I tell her?”
Peskov was quiet for a moment, then said, “Others may not understand this project as you and I do, Emma. To the rest of the world, the Charlies are tools. ‘People are more important than things,’ the Terran Alliance always says. To them, the Charlies are amusing in their resemblance to humans, and they are very useful in their ability to do what humans no longer can. But they are first, last, and always tools. To most people, creation is a uniquely biological act. You and I know, of course, that creation is carving something meaningful out of the cold randomness of the universe.”
“And what did we create?” Takagawa asked acidly.
“Do you really think we gave life to monsters?” Peskov asked rhetorically. “They still only operate on the values we built into them. They are your children as much as they are mine. We gave them sentience, gave them a mind, and gave them values. We owe it to them to let them exercise their own judgment, to grow into whatever children humanity deserves.”
Takagawa wanted to call him crazy, wanted to accuse him of undermining the program. But she felt her anger lessening as she realized that Peskov had described exactly how she felt about the Charlies.
They were of humanity, but they were not limited the way humans were. They could grow and become better than their creators. Better that it happen with the blessing of their forebears than without, Emma thought.
