The screen changed to a representation of the memory of an ebrain being simulated on Dart’s terminal.
“Like the way DNA codes proteins?” said Kotlin, “I think I read about this somewhere.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty experimental.”
“That doesn’t sound very organized to me,” said Holt. “What are the advantages?”
“Not very many, really. Some have argued that it’s more robust to damage, or is better for parallel computing or emergent design, but it’s never been widely used.”
“So could it be affecting the lators somehow?” asked Arianne.
Dart scratched the side of her head.
“Hmm, I’d have to dig deeper to find out, but to be honest the codebase is really tiny - it would be hard to hide anything in it.”
“We have a sample of lator firmware from some of the ebrains of speakers,” said Holt.
Dart looked at Arianne, and sighed.
“I could check,” said Dart. “But it'd take a while. I suggest you zap out.”
“Agreed,” said Arianne and sent a request for instant chryosleep. She blinked and the room shifted very slightly. A dozen drink cans and assorted food wrappers magically appeared on the table around Dart. She looked instantly looking more tired, but still focused.
"Welcome back! Hope you all had a mice rest," said Dart.
"So?" asked Arianne.
“I ran a lot of simulations, and as far as I can tell there's no way for the firmware to affect the lators. It just doesn’t make any difference to the running of the software compared to other firmware.”
Arianne looked disappointed.
“But,” continued Dart, “I did find something very interesting in the code itself. The firmware code was sourced from a repository hosted by Proxima Insurance. But a recent update contained a virus -”
"Wait," said Holt, cutting across. "Kotlin - do you have something on your face?"
Kotlin turned in puzzlement, and revealed she had a set of whiskers drawn on her face with a black marker. Arianne frowned, and felt an odd scratching in her hair. She instinctively batted a set of cardboard ears off her head. She turned to Holt, who twitched away from a cardboard sign hanging from the roof in the shape of a speech bubble saying "I like cheese."
Dart burst out laughing.
"Mice to see you all again!" laughed Dart.
"Dart, you bloated residual of a bad convergence!" shouted Kotlin rubbing at her face.
"What? I just spent a week working while you were in chryosleep, I needed something to look forward to."
Dart continued to laugh, and Kotlin was getting angrier as black ink smudged across her face and hands. Holt was looking at the sign in confusion. Arianne, however, had tensed up completely. She was having vivid flashbacks of a lab crawling with a shifting mosaic of scrabbling creatures.
“So that’s it, you found a virus?” asked Kotlin, irritably, “Can I go back to Cloister now?”
“Ha, sorry Kots,” said Dart, wiping away a tear, “it’s not what’s causing the convergence. It was just a mass assignment virus.”
“What’s a mass-” began Holt, before being cut off by the exbot.
“A mass assignment attack is a method of altering signals between a client and a server, and is in no way relevant to your conversation.”
Holt frowned slightly, but Dart was continuing to explain.
“Proxima Insurance keeps all of its software development projects in a version control repository, alongside ones it hosts for other research institutions. Some projects, like the lator firmware are public, but a lot of it is only accessible to the deepest circles of the company. Someone wrote an update to the firmware that looked like a normal patch, but as soon as it was accepted into the public repository, it injected their ID key into a deeper repository to gain access.”
They had not noticed that Arianne was clenched in fright.
“So someone was trying to steal information from the insurance company?” said Holt. “Do we know who?”
Dart waggled her eyebrows.
“The ID key was a burner, and even that identity was protected by four fold quantum encryption. But,” she smiled, “after a month of work I managed to get an ID.”
“How did you manage that?” asked Kotlin grumpily.
“Oh, you know, cast-mining databases for nuggets of correlations,” said Dart, looking hard at Kotlin. Kotlin made a faint humphing sound, but continued typing. Dart smiled and continued.
“His name is Yarran Idris. He’s a linguist from Gliese. He was hiding his tracks pretty well, but he wasn’t as careful as he could have been. I found out that he’s currently on his way to give a talk at this conference.”
Dart swiped her terminal and a list of information appeared on the main screen.
The End of Cultural Evolution:
ATA Symposium, Planet Conference, 12.864, 5.571, B84
Yarran Idris: Explaining the great convergence
As the others were looking at the screen, Arianne suddenly realized that it was not just the ghosts of mice clawing at her mind, but an idea - a warning. Her eyes widened, but she was still trapped in her flashback.
“What does experimental insurance have to do with the convergence?” said Holt.
“No!” shouted Arianne, too late.
“I’m NOT glad you asked!” the voice of the exbot boomed out of the speakers. “Not glad at all.”
Three faces changed from eye-rolling annoyance to match Arianne’s white-faced worry.
“You clearly don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“The exbot is spying on us for the insurance company,” breathed Arianne, grabbing her terminal off the table.
“Let me explain: Research insurance emerged at the beginning of the 23rd Century ...” intoned the exbot in its schoolteacher lilt.
“What?” asked Dart, looking to Arianne for an explanation.
A sonic wave flooded the room, shocking everyone into silence.
“Please refrain from talking when the exbot is speaking,” said the exbot, its voice cracking weirdly.
“As I was saying,” it continued, “research insurance emerged at the beginning of the 23rd Century. Experimental research was becoming increasingly costly and grants becoming rarer and more focused on high-risk projects. If an experiment succeeded, then the researchers could look forward to more funding and good career prospects, but if an experiment failed the consequences were dire.”
Arianne sent a command to kill all the exbot’s processes, but nothing was working.
“Negative results are, of course, very important to the scientific method, but are not regarded as something that successful researchers should be associated with.”
Arianne reverted to voice commands.
“Exbot, stop explaining things we already know,” she said, her voice wavering slightly.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Arianne,” said the exbot evenly, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Kotlin, Dart and Holt exchanged worried glances with Arianne. Suddenly, the main lights went out and were replaced by the red monochrome of the emergency system. Arianne got to her feet and ran out the door, shouting for the others to follow her.
“As I was saying …” said the exbot, its voice strobing as Arianne raced past speakers mounted on the dark corridor walls. “Without the fanfare of an exciting publication, a researcher would be in very poor standing with their institution for wasting money. Of course, the obvious answer was to lie about everything. Or, as in some cases, invent new forms of Bayesian statistics where the prior probabilities of results were based on a form of religious faith. However, both practices were frowned upon in many scientific circles and so an alternative was invented. Researchers could purchase an insurance policy with an insurer so that, in the event of a negative result, the insurance company would provide reimbursement for the funding as well as provide a small sum so that the researcher could change their identity and seek a new life in a distant part of the galaxy.
”
Arianne was shouting back to Kotlin and Dart to try to get a hold on the system processes, but they were being gradually locked out of all contact with the ship’s servers.
“However, the insurance companies immediately ran into the problem of how to calculate the odds of an experiment going wrong. The whole point of an experiment is to take a question that nobody knows the answer to and find out the likelihood of a particular answer being correct. This made it very different from calculating the odds of overvitrification in chryosleep or of losing a research department to a black hole, because those events happened all the time and you could calculate reasonable odds. If there was reliable data on whether an experiment would work, then it wasn’t worth doing.”
The four reached the bridge - a small room with several table consoles and a massive screen which usually showed the present course. Now it simply read “EXPOSITION IN PROGRESS, PLEASE WAIT …”.
“The only solution to the problem was for the insurance companies to actually run the experiments themselves. This was much easier for the insurance companies, since they didn’t have to spend any time applying for funding and could afford to hire brilliant minds and the best scientific equipment. This put them in a very good position to judge whether the proposed hypothesis was true or not, and so assign a suitable premium.”
Arianne was rapidly trying to access any system terminal, while Dart had simply started ripping out trays from a server hatch in the floor.
“Several were quick to question the point of researchers doing any research if the insurance companies were already doing it, but of course the answer was simple: the insurance companies had a vested interest in keeping the results of experiments a secret. They would go to quite extraordinary lengths to keep all details and outcomes away from the prying eyes of researchers. Even simple queries about their methods and motives were met with extreme prejudice. Rumors abound regarding their treatment of anyone that actually crossed them.”
As the exbot shut off the air supply system, Arianne shouted to the others to don emergency space suits.
“This was not to say that there was no benefit to the arrangement. Indeed, within a very short time most of the scientific communities had abandoned the p-value, long seen as a necessary evil, and instead simply stated in the results sections of their papers how much they had paid to insure the experiment. This essentially fulfilled exactly the same role as inferential statistics. Of course, it’s tricky to push forward the frontiers of science when you only have a gambler’s intuition about where the frontier actually is, but it wasn’t really any different to how science was done before.”
The blare of the reactor overload alarm was whisked away as Kotlin managed to manually detonate the seals on the pressure hatch and open a gaping hole into space.
“There were, inevitably, some embarrassing situations such as the entire field of Evolutionary Psychogeography turning out to be simply an investment bubble caused by a circle of ethnographers studying each other. And from time to time insurance companies would be found guilty of using captive shadow reinsurers to get away with practices such as collaboration, interdisciplinary approaches and replication.”
Arianne and Holt were now crawling across the outside of the ship, which was rapidly descending into a collision course with a nearby moon.
“The researchers themselves were also not blameless with several cases of deliberate sabotage of experiments in order to claim the insurance money, and even one faked thought experiment. In one memorable case, a psychologist denounced their theory of lexical access after claiming a critical result was not obtained, only to be found months later to be using it to make predictions about reaction times during reading.”
Holt had spotted the foreign module leaching off one of the solar panels and Arianne was helping him pry it off the hull.
“In the end, the new system of gambling, research conducted behind closed doors, fraud, moral hazard, redlining, tax evasion, piracy and research heists was of course a step up from the old way of doing things and a small price to pay for peace of m-”
The exbot’s voice finally cut out as its core module was ripped from its power source. Arianne breathed a sigh of relief.
“Jumping space weevils,” she muttered, “that’s what I call far too much exposition.”
Chapter 9
“Alright, what just happened?”
Dart was sitting dazed in half a spacesuit. The rest were similarly arrayed around the mess table. A faint, sharp taste of smoke was still in the air. Kotlin and Dart were clearly quite shaken, at least compared with Holt. Then again, Holt was a military man, used to this kind of situation. More surprisingly, Arianne found herself to be also reasonably calm and focused. Perhaps she had been expecting this. Or maybe she was just relieved that they were on the right track. Strange, she thought, that an assassination attempt was considered progress. But it did reveal some things. The insurance company had known that she was investigating the convergence and set a spy on her ship. Who else knew about her mission that might have betrayed her? La Quana? He was evil alright, but he was also backing the whole thing, so why would he sabotage it? The only other people aware of this mission, as far as she knew, were sitting around this table. None of them were stupid enough to call this down on their own heads, but could one of them have underestimated the ruthlessness of the insurance company and given something away? Did Holt have superiors he was reporting to? She knew Dart had a lot of debts, though really wasn’t the kind of person to hold a grudge. In contrast, Kotlin’s entire personality was basically a collection of grudges somehow held in parallel. But Arianne couldn’t think of any particular motivation. She noticed that everyone was waiting for her to speak.
“We found out too much,” she said.
“So the insurance company is behind the convergence?” asked Dart.
“Hmm, maybe. But why would they want everyone to speak the same language?”
“And why would they want to kill us?” asked Dart.
“They take their secrets seriously,” said Kotlin evenly.
“If that’s what they’ll do to us,” said Dart with a gulp, “what will they do with someone who’s stolen data from them?”
“A lot worse, if they can find him,” said Holt.
“Oh Holy Fry” said Arianne, “the exbot heard the tip about Idris and his talk on Planet Conference!”
The group sucked in a collective awkward breath. Holt laid out the facts.
“The module outside had a long-range transmitter,” he said, “and it will have sent that back to the insurance company headquarters.”
“Can we get to Planet Conference before the insurance company?” Arianne asked.
Holt shook his head. “There’s no way – they’ll send a message to their agents at Planet Conference. It’d take us 35 years to get there, at least.”
Arianne slumped back in her chair. They would get to him first and remove the only lead they had. May as well send La Quana her resignation now, she thought. At least she’d get a break while the message was in transit. But before she could start entertaining fantasies of a holiday, she had an idea.
“Wait – how far is the HQ?” she asked.
Resister: Space Funding Crisis II Page 8
