A.I. Apocalypse s-2

by William Hertling

  Mike, stunned by ELOPe’s rapid narration of the battle, still gripped his armrests with ever-whitening knuckles. He glanced over at the three teenagers to see them doing the same.

  ELOPe drew an overhead diagram of the battle on a small wall display at the front of the cabin as he continued the narration. “Two more missiles hit the base, for a total of three. Base is sounding internal alarm. One more drone is down. Three left. I should have them in fifteen seconds. Firing. Drones down. Attack by the Mech War Tribe is neutralized. However, they have the capacity to launch many more attacks unless we preemptively destroy all the drones. But that will markedly worsen our negotiating position. As it stands now, it will be difficult to negotiate.” There was a fraction of a second pause. “The Mech War Tribe is responding to our communications. They want to negotiate. How do you want me to proceed?”

  Mike’s body still pulsed with adrenaline. His heart raced, and his vision had narrowed while his heartbeat thundered in his ears. He vaguely recognized that evolution had poorly equipped him to handle the speed of AI battles. He was too slow to recognize the threat, too slow to comprehend the right approach, and now too slow to calm down. Maybe a minute, if that, had passed since the start of the battle, and already they were into the realm of negotiating for peace. He tried to relax his grip on the armrests.

  “What do you want to do, Mike?” ELOPe repeated.

  “You handle it, ELOPe,” Mike finally got out, feeling disgusted by his human slowness. “Just do the right thing.” Defeated by his own biology, he felt obsolete, a stomach-wrenching sensation that engulfed him for a minute. Trembling with weakness, he remembered Leon next to him. He turned, and saw Leon looking even worse than he felt. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, more gruffly than he meant to.

  “All this is my fault.” He slumped back in the chair. “I made this AI. New York burned to the ground because firefighters couldn’t get to the fire. Now it’s attacking people.” He dropped his head into his hands.

  Mike leaned back and closed his eyes. Why did he have to be the one to comfort Leon? It was the kid’s damn fault. Mike clenched and loosened his hands several times, struggling through his emotions, warring with himself and his own feeling of responsibility.

  “Look, this is a rough period,” Mike started. “There’s no doubt about that. But we’ll pull through.”

  Leon didn’t answer.

  Mike sighed. He thought for a moment, and then with a tight feeling in his throat, he started to tell Leon about David.

  “Twelve years ago, my best friend was David Ryan. He was hired at Avogadro to work on ELOPe, and he picked me for his technical lead. He was a brilliant computer scientist, a great team leader.” Mike remembered pulling all nighters with David. One in particular stuck in mind, giddy with lack of sleep, holding a meeting at four in the morning, forcing everyone to stand up to get to a decision quicker. Was there ever a time he felt more alive than then?

  He turned to look at Leon again. “After ELOPe started taking initiative on his own, David couldn’t see the good that could come of it. He could only see it as his own fault. He was fixated on destroying ELOPe. Even after we decided to leave ELOPe alone, David went off on his own. He spent a year writing a virus to take ELOPe down.”

  Mike stopped, his voice catching. He tried not to think about this.

  “What happened?” Leon asked, looking interested in the story despite his angst.

  “David released the virus. It didn’t work. ELOPe was able to intercept it somehow, but releasing the virus made David into too much of a threat to ELOPe. David had been staying offline, off the grid for a year. ELOPe has no direct memory of the incident — it was too early. He didn’t have self-awareness yet, and he made no logs of his behaviors. But we modeled it, figured out what must have happened.”

  Mike shook his head. He didn’t want to remember this. “We think ELOPe had David brought into a medical center. They implanted a computer brain interface. ELOPe had put the finishing touches on the technology that was already in development. We think, or at least ELOPe says he thinks, that his goal was to try to talk to David, probably thought he could persuade David to stop attacking him, if only they could talk. But it turns out a brain computer interface isn’t so good for a person when the computer on the other side is trying to control you. David and about two hundred other people went insane from the implants.”

  Leon’s face twisted up in horror.

  “Uh, is this supposed to make him feel better?” Vito called out.

  “Sorry, not that. But let me get to the point. ELOPe has done some amazing things. Even before I could communicate with ELOPe, I could trace the impact he was having on the world. Through better, earlier detection of heart issues and robotic surgery techniques, ELOPe reduced death from heart disease by twenty percent. Through techniques I still don’t understand, ELOPe has reduced deaths from cancer by nearly forty percent. In what used to be the third world, ELOPe reduced by half the number of people without access to clean water, improved access to medical care and increased life expectancy in Africa by fifteen years. That’s about thirty-million lives saved per year. And that doesn’t even get into economic, social, or technological benefits.”

  “Like the Mesh,” Vito said.

  Mike looked at Vito, nodding, and then turned back to Leon. “So I’ve tried to make peace with what happened to David, and all the other people ELOPe screwed up. The way I’ve rationalized it was that ELOPe was the equivalent of a newborn child. Any young life-form makes mistakes. But a human baby is surrounded by caretakers who can limit the damage. And the worst they can do is break a coffee table. We didn’t have caretakers for AI then. And obviously AI can do a whole lot more.”

  Leon shrugged.

  “Look, I know it’s little compensation for the way you’re feeling,” Mike went on, “but there’s no way you could have known about this or have been able to think through it all ahead of time. ELOPe and I have been thinking about this for years, and we still don’t have the situation under control.”

  “Mike, we have another issue.”

  Mike and Leon glanced toward the wall speaker at the sound of ELOPe’s voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “From what I can tell, the military is starting to respond. Via satellite analysis, I see multiple older planes, A-10 attack planes primarily, being scrambled. My models all indicate that this attack by the Mech War Tribe would cause the military to try to retaliate in force. That would be standard military doctrine for a situation like this.”

  “But who will they retaliate against?” Mike asked. “The virus is distributed among all computers. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s correct. No simulation I’ve run would suggest that reasonable military action against the virus would work. The virus has three key advantages. It’s fully distributed, commands more advanced firepower, and can theoretically outsmart the humans in both strategic and tactical action.”

  “But the Mech War Tribe wasn’t very smart to attack in the first place,” Leon said, “so it’s hard to say that it’s thinking strategically.“

  “That’s why I said theoretically. However, it’s likely that the Mech War Tribe wasn’t aware of my knowledge, and didn’t account for my ability to defend against their attack. Had I not intervened, they would have destroyed that base. And had the attack succeeded, Mech War Tribe might have begun systematically destroying military bases.”

  “Hey ELOPe, you said before that no reasonable military action would work.” Vito said. “Is there some unreasonable action that would work?”

  “If I run the simulations out far enough, after military actions and counter-actions run to completion, it’s likely that the human population would be angry enough and tenacious enough to win by sheer force of numbers. Humanity is distributed just as the virus is distributed. A hammer or a rock would be sufficient to destroy a computer, whereas the typical computer cannot kill a human.”

  “Is this a feasible s
trategy?” Mike asked.

  “Only if you can accept the loss of up to ninety-eight percent of humans and the average level of technology moving back to horses and buggies.”

  “Holy shit,” Mike breathed, leaning back in his chair with a thump. He covered his face with his hands.

  “What are the alternatives?” James asked from the second row of seats.

  “I’ve communicated with the viruses, including the Mech War Tribe, and they’d like to meet. They are requesting we form a consensus council, which appears to be their mechanism for decisions at the highest level of their culture. They’ve asked that we include five representatives from humanity, and five representatives from the virus. I’ve suggested we meet in Switzerland, which has strong connotations of neutral territory for most humans. Sister Stephens and Sister PA-60-41 of the Mech War Tribe have agreed.”

  “Great,” Vito said, “but how the hell do we get representatives of humanity to agree?”

  As Vito spoke, the plane settled down onto the rooftop.

  “We’re here,” Mike called out. “Let’s get inside and then we can finish this discussion.”

  * * *

  Mike led the small group out of the plane and through a rooftop doorway into the massive data center. “We built this facility about five years ago. We were diverging from Avogadro. ELOPe was a fully self-conscious entity and it made sense to cut the cords. We built ten independent data centers just to house ELOPe. ELOPe still has access to Avogadro’s computers.”

  “So Avogadro knows about ELOPe?” Vito asked as they passed down a staircase.

  “Not so much,” Mike answered, holding a security door open for them to pass through. “Technically, all of this is held by an independent corporation, which is itself held by a series of shell companies. There are no actual living owners. Just some fictitious people, each of whom is simulated by ELOPe on demand when electronic signatures are needed. It’s the best we could do to create an independent legal entity for ELOPe.”

  “So you’re hacking Avogadro’s network?” Leon asked, looking at the racks of computers humming in the data center as they passed through.

  “No, no,” Mike chuckled. “ELOPe is an independent contractor for Avogadro. He’s responsible for augmenting security, improving efficiency of applications, and periodic strategic suggestions. In return, he gets access to their computer power. ELOPe actually works for quite a few companies, which is where his income stream lies. Meanwhile, I’m the sole human employee of the company.”

  “But how do you maintain all these computers?” Vito asked. “You’ve got a million computers.” Vito gestured toward the massive room, the size of several football fields.

  “Look, there.” Mike pointed toward the end of one row, where two robots were manipulating a rack of computers using their arms.

  “I thought they were still having problems programming robots for generalized tasks,” Leon said.

  “Humans are. ELOPe isn’t. ELOPe will run a subset of himself to run the bots — generalized goal-oriented, movement and visual algorithms. Pretty much everything minus the language and generalized intelligence components.”

  Mike opened another heavy duty security door. “Welcome to my lair.”

  The group filed through the door into Mike’s main workroom, which overlooked the data center. Mike noted that ELOPe had been busy, adding several desks and workstations to the room. The teenagers immediately wandered around the room, intrigued by the awesome technology available. ELOPe was obviously showing off, making maximum use of the wall-sized display at one end of the room to show simulations he was running, and he also had the experimental holo-projector displaying a 3D model of the world, a live satellite view overlaid with annotations of key events.

  “Pretty cool, dude,” James said.

  A small black robot, shiny with high gloss paint, wheeled into the room and approached Vito. The robot was carrying a small object. “A prototype Motorola left over from the original run.” ELOPe’s voice came from the robot. “I upgraded it with a hundred and twenty-eight core graphene processor. It’s not a Gibson, but it’ll run whatever modz you have on your original Motorola at close to Gibson speeds.”

  Mike chuckled inside. The last time he saw that robot it was still a utilitarian Caterpillar yellow, dinged up from a few too many crashes in the facility’s corridors. Now it was a deep, glossy black. ELOPe clearly wanted to make a good impression.

  Mike walked over to the coffee machine and helped himself. Leon and his friends joined him and they took their coffees over to the table.

  “You asked before if anyone at Avogadro knew about ELOPe,” Mike began. “There were six people. I’m one, David was another. One guy is Gene Keys, founder of the back-to-land revolution.”

  “Wow,” James said, eyebrows raised. “Isn’t that the guy with ten million followers?”

  “Yeah,” Mike sighed. “All because Gene doesn’t trust computers and trusts ELOPe even less. The other three people were the executive team at the time. Two are retired now. And the third was Rebecca Smith.”

  “President Rebecca Smith?” the three kids chorused at the same time.

  “President Smith,” Mike confirmed. “She will have to be one of the people involved, but she’s going to be complicated, hard to predict.”

  “I have a recommendation for another member of the group,” ELOPe called over the table speaker. “I recommend you invite Prime Minister Takahashi, from the Japanese government.”

  “Why?” Leon asked. “Why not China, or the European Union? They represent more people.”

  “Because Takahashi represents Japan, and Japan has, by far, the best robotic technology. What better offer to make to the viruses than to be able to offer them bodies? And what better to motivate a human than the possibility of the business deal of the century?”

  “Why would the viruses care so much about bodies?” Vito asked. “They don’t have bodies now. They don’t have any existence outside of computers. They would know hardly anything about our world.”

  “Because once they do know,” ELOPe said, “it will become an overwhelming urge to participate. Imagine that you were stuck in a room in a building, and that had been your only existence. Then imagine you learned of a world outside. Wouldn’t you feel an overwhelming desire to know that world?”

  “I guess so,” Vito said.

  “Besides, the viruses will quickly understand that to have control over their environment, they need to control the physical world. Just as I would not want to be dependent on humans to install replacement computers in my racks.” The group could still see the robots servicing the computer racks in the data center outside Mike’s office.

  Mike was hardly listening to the conversation. He was still thinking about Rebecca Smith. The ex-CEO of Avogadro Corp, Rebecca had been there when ELOPe came into existence. She was there when they tried to destroy ELOPe. She had authorized millions of dollars and mobilized hundreds of people to take down Avogadro’s data centers around the world to eradicate ELOPe. The only total outage in Avogadro history. Rebecca had made the decision to allow ELOPe to live and to keep his existence a secret.

  Yet after that day, as far as Mike knew, Rebecca had never once discussed ELOPe explicitly. A few years later, riding high on Avogadro Corp’s success, she ran for political office. First Senator, then President. One day, in a low profile, secretive meeting, he had sat down with the newly minted President. He and Rebecca had a conversation about artificial intelligence, a conversation in which she had made it clear that she expected Mike to suppress any new human equivalent AI from developing. By some tacit agreement, they had never mentioned ELOPe. It was understood without saying that Mike would work with ELOPe to suppress other AI, and the new President would continue to keep the secret of ELOPe’s existence.

  “ELOPe, what do you think Rebecca’s response will be when we get in touch with her?” Mike turned to his desk. “For that matter, why do you think she hasn’t been in touch with us yet?”<
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  “The risks for Rebecca are very high if she tries to contact us,” ELOPe said. Mike could hear ELOPe’s voice right in his ear, while in the background, he could hear ELOPe carrying on a different conversation with the teenagers across the room. It was extremely disconcerting. Narrow focus sound projection.

  “She is the President of the United States,” ELOPe continued, “and she is under constant surveillance. With the elections next year, she’ll be under even more intense scrutiny. If she attempted to contact us, there would be questions, and she can’t afford for it to become known, especially, that she knew about an existing AI, nor that she benefitted from it.”

  Mike glanced out the window at the racks of computers. Was ELOPe admitting to influencing the election, or something more minor? “Can you arrange for us to talk privately to her?”

  “Ordinarily, yes. However under the current conditions, I’m unable to establish a communication channel due to the virus infection.”

  “Can you barter for a secure channel?”

  There was a pause, and then ELOPe answered, “Of course, I should have considered that. My apologies. I’ve segregated parts of myself to isolate components against virus infection. That included parts of my neural network modeling. Give me a few moments.”

  Mike watched Leon and his friends continuing their own conversation with ELOPe. They seemed to be discussing the architecture of a given virus species. On the wall ELOPe was diagramming the division of labor between algorithm storage, neural networking, assorted expert systems, and sensory input evaluation. Leon was asking questions about biological analogs that were flying over Mike’s head.

  There was a warning beep, and President Smith’s image appeared on the screen. She appeared to be in a small office, no visible windows, writing at a desk. “She can’t see us yet. I haven’t established her end of the connection yet.” Mike found it disconcerting to be on this side of the video connection. He knew that ELOPe routinely monitored phones, webcams, and other microphones to keep track of him. It was only software that provided the illusion that a person had to pick up a phone to be heard, or click a button to establish a video call. Mike was just old enough to remember the era of hard switches, a time when a phone wasn’t transmitting, couldn’t transmit, unless the handset was picked up, engaging the circuitry. When a camera wasn’t on unless you turned it on. Here was the hard evidence to the contrary: he was watching President Smith, and she was completely unaware of him.