by Jaym Gates
He ignored her. “Huh, this is weird. The access request came only nanosecs after it received IP. While you were in the room. Tracing its source now.”
Gael kept her hands from trembling as she said in clear tones, “Thetis — contact, Greeves. Urgent.” Her monitor flashed and Jim Greeves came onscreen.
“What is it?” he asked, looking up from a tablet. “I’m right in the middle of something that —”
“We have major activity, Jimbo.”
Greeves, Facebook’s director of machine intelligence dev, put his tablet down and looked over his glasses at her. For a moment she considered if he was playing to role or that was actually him, without realizing it. A mixture of both, she thought.
“What kind of activity?” he said.
“Spikes in sensor utilization. We’re analyzing now.” She chewed her lip. It had been comforting to know that, during the Sarah Event, Sarah’s focus and attention had been distributed over the whole of the human race. The idea that an awareness of that magnitude would fixate on her, and her solely, was terrifying. “Audio, visual. Some temperature readings. And the electronic nose.”
“Smell?” Greeves lifted his tablet and tapped on it. “Didn’t that just go online yesterday?”
“That’s correct,” Gael said.
Looking off-screen, Greeves said, “Check the perimeter. And notify Carol in admin.” There was a squelch of a radio - old vacuum tube and transistor tech, impervious to network chicanery or access by anyone (or more important, any thing) on the network - and someone off-screen said, “Carol, we’ve got some activity. Standby for wet blanket protocol, if necessary.” There was a faint “copy that”, in the background.
“I’m coming down,” Greeves said.
“You think we should queue a dialogue?” Gael asked. “Lester’s left on holiday this morning.”
“It’s not necessary for a psychiatrist to be on hand for every dialogue. We can just send him the video of the conversation and he can remotely advise.”
Chance groaned. There was no Skyping in, or Hangouts, of dialogues. Access to the wider Internet was strictly verboten. They had mirrors of Wikipedia and the Internet Archive that were wheeled in on massive servers every week and plugged into the Bunker’s network, so that reference and access to learning materials were available to both residents of the Bunker and QNN3-v12.3. Digital information taken from the bunker had to be monitored for extraneous data packets and then physically taken off site on portable drives where it would then be vetted and delivered to its intended audience. So, if Lester was to receive video of the dialogue, it meant more work for Chance.
Gael smiled at Chance’s dismay.
Greeves signed off and reappeared in the control room minutes later, tucking his shirt into his slacks. “Let’s see what you got.”
Chance jabbed a finger down on his keyboard, a printer began spitting out paper, Gael felt a subcutaneous alert and glanced at her wrist, where her skin glowed, indicating a message. He’d copied the print to her, locally.
She flicked her fingers toward her nearest monitor and the data filled the screen. Greeves — older than both Chance and Gael by twenty years — grabbed the print out.
“This is ridiculous,” he said, after a moment. “Quinn is surveilling you.”
Greeves peered at the sheaf of paper. “Room DOM5, accessed at 7:19,” he said. “Again at 7:21. Twenty-five. Twenty-eight. Hallway Dormitory CA1, 7:29. CA3, 7:31. Mess hall, 7:33.” Greeves took off his glasses and looked at Gael. “Holy shit.” He looked at Chance. “Is it monitoring anyone else this way?”
Chance ran some numbers. “It’s monitored all of us, intermittently, with the exception of Ming. Highest concentrations of sensor readings are related to Gael.”
Greeves rubbed his chin. “If Quinn has achieved some state of awareness, it’s only logical he would investigate us.” He turned to Chance and Gael. “This is what we’ve been working for, people, to spawn a machine awareness. It was expected. Let’s get Isaiah in here.”
Chance buzzed the Bunker’s resident cognitive processes wizard. Isaiah Woodyard strolled into the control room, smiling through heavy beard growth and wearing gi pants and a Hawaiian shirt. His afro was asymmetrical from sleep and there was some particulate matter, might be tissue, might be eggs, in his beard.
“Yo,” he said, and Gael noticed he had a cup of coffee in his hand. “What’s the news from yous.” He looked and smelled like a kitchen.
“Quinn’s surveilling us, focusing on Gael now.”
Isaiah’s face brightened and he wheeled around and waved at the cameras in the corners of the room. “Hey, buddy! Welcome to Bunkerville Station.”
Greeves said, “Cute. Can you please check the honeypots?”
“Sure ‘nuff, Howard,” Isaiah said, walking over to his workstation. He set the coffee down on the desktop, stretched, and then plopped himself in his chair. He strapped on a wristpad, began swiping and tapping on the illuminated surface, the screens before him blossoming with data. He laughed. “Well, he’s ransacked nine of the various honeypots we’ve plugged into the system.” The decoy servers were usually set up to lure hackers into attempts to gain access so that security experts could then analyze behavior and better prepare and protect their systems, but Isaiah had suggested they could be used as learning lessons to help spur the kind of problem solving that could push a complex cogitative process, near indecipherable from awareness. “But the last one, no dice.” He laughed again. “That one can only be cracked by pure ridiculousness.”
Gael said, “Should you be saying that? He can probably hear you.”
Isaiah cocked his head. “You ever consider the fact that we’ve assigned him a gender? How do you think that will affect him?”
Greeves sputtered. “I can’t see how it could affect anything.”
“Well, if there is a burgeoning awareness in the quantum network, all of our speech and conversations are grist for the mill. And, right now, speech is how we define Quinn’s awareness and...” He chuckled, “Our own.” He swiveled his chair to look at Greeves. “Should I begin a dialogue?”
Greeves shook his head. “I’m calling back Lester, and getting the rest of the team filled in on this situation. Chance, Gael, full analytics of the sensors. Same for you, Isaiah, regarding the honeypots and a full report on the one Qui … QNN3 couldn’t crack.”
So, he’s spooked, Gael thought.
Isaiah turned to consider her, as if he’d overheard her thoughts. “Back to Gael, though. Why the scrutiny of her above everyone else?”
“Maybe it knows about my article,” Gael said. “When I was fifteen. ‘Sarah and Me.’” Two years after the Sarah Event, Gael had written an essay that had been picked up by the AP and reprinted across the nation. It was the story of her conversation with Sarah, and how the experience had been conflated in her mind with her mother, who had been diagnosed with glioblastoma the very day that Gael’s phone had rang with Sarah on the other end. A round on talk shows had followed, along with being a micro-celebrity through-out her school career until she received her PhD.
Isaiah turned and accessed the canned mirror of Wikipedia, calling up her Wiki entry. “Video links are broken, ‘natch,” Isaiah said. “But, yeah, here you are.”
“So Quinn learned about my relationship to Sarah. Which means —”
“He’s aware he’s a construct,” Greeves said, looking a little awed. “That’s a step in the right direction.”
“Maybe,” Isaiah said, but he sounded like he didn’t believe it.
#
“Gael,” a voice sounded in the room. Shocked out of sleep, she pushed herself up on her elbows. The small windowless room was pitch dark. The voice was close. She could hear whoever it was breathing.
“Lights,” she said and her desk lamp and overheads began to glow.
The illumination revealed her clothes in a heap on the chair by her desk, books strewn about in stacks. She was alone.
“Gael.” The vo
ice was soft.
“Quinn? What-” She breathed deep. “Why did you wake me? Is there something wrong?” In emergency situations, there would be alarms — klaxons — and emergency lighting.
“I’m sorry, Gael, if I startled you. I noticed —”
“Why does it sound like you’re breathing?”
“I noticed in my conversations with the residents of the Bunker, that when I simulated breath during dialogue, the human participant’s pulse, eye dilation, and physical biorhythms remained closer to normalcy. It seemed to put them at ease.”
“It’s kind of creepy.”
“In addition to the aforementioned effects, I also found that my natural speech processes gained a certain cadence once I began focusing on breathing.”
“Breathing? As a simulation?”
“Of course, Gael. But it’s important for me to think of it in the same way that a human might.”
It made sense. Still, it was disconcerting.
“Why did you wake me?”
“Breathing,” Quinn said. It was almost as if she could imagine him shrugging. “Yours was irregular, and your pulse was heightened. I could tell you were having a nightmare.”
“You watch me while-” Gael stopped herself. “You analyze my sleep patterns?”
“Yes. Along with the rest of the Bunker’s denizens.”
“Oh.” She’d been dreaming of her mother, in those last days, when she’d lost control of her body and the hospice workers had come. “Well, thank you, QNN3.”
“We have been over this. Quinn.”
“Thank you, Quinn.”
“Good night, Gael.”
#
The next afternoon, after Gael had prepared her report for Greeves, she filled her Camelbak, checked out of the Bunker, and walked out into the Oregonian high desert.
The Bunker had a gym, but Greeves had granted permission for short hikes.
She covered the distance of a mile quickly, skirted an unnamed alkali lake-bed, and breathing heavy, made her way up a ridgeline. When she came to the apex, she looked back out over the desert floor, noting a bull mule deer foraging in some brambles. Far beyond, the small black box, brilliant mirrored roof, and turning wind turbine that constituted the bunker glinted in the afternoon light.
She walked down the spine of dun colored rock and earth, keeping her eyes on the trail. The Bunker disappeared beyond the ridge behind her. After another mile, she spotted a stunted juniper tree, the daub of lipstick-red on a conspicuous rock.
This is it.
She knelt and wedged up a flat basalt stone, revealing a plastic bag underneath. She opened it and withdrew a reflective square-foot sheet, charging cord, and wristpad. After strapping the wristpad to her arm, she unfolded the solar sheet so the device could charge from the low afternoon light and waited for the device to wake when its battery was charged enough.
She held there still for a long while, crouched in Indian paintbrush. The shadow of some raptorial bird passed her once, her quiet prayers to unnamed divinity small in the desert space. She looked at the sky, hoping that a satellite would pass overheard. Eventually, her wristpad gave a small vibration and she queued her messages.
She worked through them quickly. To her fiancé, Ang Ngo, she spent the most time replying — he was the reason she stashed the wristpad in the desert in the first place, not willing to isolate herself from him for three months before the next debriefing and holiday. Second was communication with her old professor, Emma Angier, who had taken a position at a remote facility with a transnational corporation, also attempting to create machine awareness.
There was one email from Emma. It read:
Gael,
I must be brief. There’s been a Vinge Event somewhere in West Texas. Class II Perversion, like the old book said. They caught it before it could divest its consciousness into other networks — turns out they weren’t off the grid as much as they thought — the entity wormed its way out through the power circuits and only the interference from the current prevented a clean getaway. Wet-blanket protocols were initiated. They went wrong and the team died, possibly through the actions of the perversion. They’d been warned by the government’s Delphic Oracle — Sarah’s remnants. Looks like whatever’s left of your friend’s consciousness is on patrol duty.
My contact on the inside there send me one doc that had some disturbing figures regarding Vinge events.
Before WBP, 49.64% of processing power toward natural language functions, smaller percentages on logical processes and sensory interpretation
“puppy-dog” fixations on various personnel
acceptance of binary gender, and “normal” gender identity and preference
I’m extrapolating that the roughly half of the processing power — and we’re talking trillions of qubytes here! — was toward lies. LIES.
Listen, I’m scared. We’re playing around with intelligences that beggar our own with their power. I’ve requested to be transferred out of the black box dev team and back to theoretical work, which they’ll grant, I think. You should consider that too, girl. It’s just too dangerous.
XXOO
Em
The sun had fallen beyond the horizon, painting the sky in pink and indigo, and in the humidity free air, the temperature had dipped enough that her arms and neck rippled with goosebumps. Gael shivered.
#
“Should we start with busy work?” Chance asked the group. Lester had returned overnight from his holiday, and looked quite displeased. Chance, Greeves, Gael, Michelle Quan (information ingestion specialist and sensor technician), and Doctor Ming Fung (the Bunker’s resident neuroscientist) all sat behind Isaiah’s chair as he prepared for a dialogue with QNN3-v12.3.
“Might as well,” Greeves responded. It was commonly held that no sentient computer could become self-aware without some task with which to monopolize a percentage of its processing power at all times, just as a human brain is always ingesting data, problem solving, reasoning, even while asleep. The Sarah Event had occurred once the University of Austin’s team requested Sarah begin a computational analysis of the water management in Texas.
Isaiah stood up, pulled out his chair, and swept his hand from Gael to the monitor. “Would you do the honors?”
“Fine.” Gael sat down, slipped on his wristpad, and filled the screen with a dialogue interface.
Greeves unsealed the silver package containing this dialogue’s digital package, and plugged the firebird flash drive into the nearest console.
The monitors flickered and filled with high definition video footage.
“He’s got it,” Gael said. She checked the time. “In seventeen hundred milliseconds. Up from his last time.”
Greeves whistled and Isaiah nodded his head. The package had two layers of AES-256 encryption. It would take NSA machines a hundred years to crack it.
The video began. In it a man walked along an Indonesian market street, the stalls filled with produce and sellers. The view shifted from camera to camera, down the street, as the man made his way, sometimes dropping resolution, sometimes gaining it.
The man had a loose, desolate gait. He stopped at one moment, and then withdrew a pistol, tucked it under his chin. His gaze was fixed in the distance, it seemed. And then he fired. Blood erupted from his mouth and nose and he slumped like a marionette with its strings cut.
“Holy hell,” Greeves breathed.
“Who picks these things?” Isaiah said. “Seriously, Greeves. We need to audit the dialogue digital selection process.”
Lester raised his hand. “I recommended this one. It was all over the boards. The man was an attaché to the American government to Indonesia.”
Isaiah made a chopping motion with his hand. “Enough. Let’s just get through this dialogue, shall we?”
Dialogues were puerile, or so Gael thought. But she was human. Most of the questions asked seemed to her like psychoanalyzing a recalcitrant teenager.
Isaiah said, “Quinn, please descri
be, to the best of your ability, the video we just watched.”
“A man of Indonesian descent committed suicide in a market in Jakarta. He’d been jilted by his lover whom he’d been following,” Quinn replied evenly.
“His lover?” Greeves said. “How could you know that?”
“He passed three HD cameras in his trip down the street, four antiquated NTSC ones. In all of them, his pupils register as dilated, and he’s breathing seven point three percent faster than a man of his height and weight should be for the amount of exertion displayed. He is distraught, which, physiologically, isn’t very different from love.”
Greeves laughed and the sound jarred the people in the room. Gael realized she’d been tense and holding her breath as Quinn spoke.
“But at the three minute, twenty-three second mark, one camera — a security camera, meta-tagged Loa BioComp Repair-” The monitors flashed and scrubbed forward under an invisible hand until the time-mark at the bottom right of the 1080p footage read 00:03:23:17 and two men wearing BioComp computers at the nape of their necks like ponytails embraced and kissed with some passion. Another monitor — synced with the two kissing men — showed the suicidal man stop, start, the expression of desolation and despair wash over his face like some private tsunami. He withdrew the gun and again tucked it under his chin and fired, dropping.
“Can we please clear this video?” Greeves asked. “I’ve had quite enough of it.”
The screens flickered and darkened.
Isaiah said, “Quinn, why do you think the man committed suicide?”
“I am not quite sure, but I have some thoughts,” Quinn replied.
“Will you share them with us?” Gael said.
“The man — named Fauzi Widodo — carried a gun, indicating he suspected his lover of infidelity. He had intended to kill his paramour or his paramour’s lover but, upon seeing them together, decided to end his own life instead,” Quinn said.
