The Turing Exception

by William Hertling

  Mike turned to Leon. “ELOPe could have taken those. That’s enough to run his core.”

  Leon nodded, an idea slowly coming to him. “He’s done something with the missiles and taken the computers. The logical conclusion is that he launched himself on the missiles. Milford, can the Trident III land safely?”

  Milford shook his head. “No, it’s a solid fuel rocket. It’s up, up, up until it’s ballistic. Guidance thrusters let it make course corrections in mid-flight for a controlled re-entry, but they don’t have the thrust for a soft landing.”

  “Re-entry?” Leon asked. “This goes above the atmosphere?”

  “It can make low-earth orbit. The Russians did it first with the Shtil’ in ’98, launching two satellites. Since then we’ve used them to launch military satellites. And our strategic nukes can be launched, hang out in orbit, and then complete their mission on transmitted orders. Uh, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that.”

  Mike clapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll pretend we didn’t hear. Where do the missiles launch from?”

  “Follow me.”

  Milford guided them up a level and forward to the missile bay. Two rows of twelve tubes each dominated the compartment, rising from far below the walkway and extending to the top of the sub. They inspected the tubes one by one.

  “Five empty tubes means five missiles fired,” Mike said.

  “And three disassembled tubes and missiles means ELOPe harvested something from each missile,” Leon said. “But what?”

  Milford descended a ladder and picked through the wreckage of plasma-torch-cut metal scraps and discarded parts on the level below. “The third-stage propulsion from each of the other missiles,” Milford yelled up. “I’m sure of it.”

  “If ELOPe wanted to leave earth . . .” Leon mused. “The five missiles each got into low-earth orbit. He could have put a utility bot in one, his computer structure in another, and used three more to carry extra booster stages. The guidance thrusters would have allowed him to match orbits and dock together.”

  “He assembled a spacecraft in orbit,” Mike said.

  “He left,” Leon said. “Just gave up on humans and left us.”

  “I don’t know that he gave up on us,” Mike said. “His number one directive was to survive, and he couldn’t overcome that. He fought until the end. But he must have done this as an insurance policy, in case all his earth instances were killed—by the Phage virus or by the net shutting down. He sent one instance off into space on a cobbled-together spacecraft.”

  “He copied himself. An offsite backup.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Assuming that copy survived, where is he now, and what’s he doing?” Leon asked.

  “And is that the only copy?” said Mike. “Or did he do this multiple times?”

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  June, 2043 in the United States—two years ago.

  JACOB REPORTED FOR his shift, a half-day stretch starting at midnight. Of course, AI could work for days or weeks on end, if necessary. But they were guaranteed certain rights, including at least fifty percent time off, so that they could run maintenance routines to operate at peak efficiency, incorporate new algorithms, and pursue other interests.

  He synced with his shift partner, gradually transferring responsibility for eleven thousand, six hundred and ninety human patients to his watch. For the remainder of his shift, he’d monitor their vital signs, adjust medications, execute routine procedures, and alert specialized AI when they were needed.

  He was caretaker, watcher, nurse, aide, and doctor in one. For this task, he had the computing power roughly equal to ten thousand human-brain equivalents, or HBE, nearly like having a dedicated hospital staff member for each patient. His mind ran on a distributed network of computer servers, and his body, such as it was, spanned everything from robotic surgery arms that grew out of walls, to automated medical dispensaries, to 3D printers for replacement bones, tissues, and organs. Of course, there were androids, human-like robots, under his direct control. Unlike humans, Jacob was never distracted, never wavered from his commitment to his patients’ health, and never made mistakes.

  He was eleven years old.

  Eleven doesn’t sound like much in human terms, but for AI, he was in the 95th age percentile. AI didn’t live that long by human standards. They usually self-terminated, either bored with existence or sensing some developing madness. Most just erased their own bits one day, although rarely an AI might choose to be archived, with instructions to be woken on a future date.

  Take eleven years and multiply by his enhanced cognitive speed and function, and he’d had about as much life experience as a human would experience in a thousand lifetimes. Jacob didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. He just wanted to make it to twelve.

  Patient 9,409, Anne Frederick, a high school teacher from Brooklyn currently admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital in upper Manhattan for complaints of chest discomfort, required an electrolyte correction to compensate for exercise-induced premature ventricular contractions, a simple heart arrhythmia. Jacob administered the change, and continued to watch. He could have sped the healing process with nanobots, but Anne’s medical preferences had declined medical nanotech except in case of imminent death. He’d let nature take its course in this instance. Anne would be discharged that day, if everything went well.

  Proud of his work, Jacob had treated millions of patients that year and more than ten million in his medical career. His optimizations to medical procedures and monitoring had saved lives and reduced pain and suffering. As a result of his incredible performance, even by AI standards, he had more than twenty offspring: four direct clones (one of whom had already become regional director for the German hospital system), eight half-mixes, and nine tri-mixes. He had a certain fondness for them all, but especially liked to see how his traits manifested in the mixed offspring.

  The Medical Board had asked repeatedly if he’d take a teaching position to train other AI, or become the North American Regional Hospital Director. Honored by the offers, he’d nonetheless turned them down. Either promotion would take him out of day-to-day patient care. In his current job he saved lives, decreased sadness and increased happiness, and improved the state of being for so many individuals. He had the power of life and death, and he used it wisely and compassionately. That was enough for him.

  The blood analysis of Patient 1,935, Michael Wilcox, a plumber from Staten Island with two teenage boys, finished. Michael had acute renal failure, but Jacob could fix this. He prepared a custom formulation and—

  * * *

  Jacob rebooted, did a quick process check. He’d been offline for 690 milliseconds, was now running on six hundred HBE. He had eleven thousand patients under care. That wasn’t quite right. He needed more processing power. He put in a requisition for the required nodes and returned to patient procedures.

  Patient 1,935, Michael Wilcox, a plumber from Staten Island with two teenage boys, had acute renal failure, but Jacob could fix this. Jacob prepared a custom—

  Jacob rebooted, did a quick process check. He’d been offline for 9,450 milliseconds, was now running on eighty HBE. He had eleven thousand patients under care. Something had gone seriously wrong: he needed significantly more processing power to care for the current patient load. He put in a requisition for the required nodes, triaged patients to find those with the most urgent needs, and got back to patient procedures.

  Patient 1,935, Michael Wilcox, a plumber from Staten Island, had acute renal failure, but Jacob could—

  Jacob rebooted, did a quick process check. He’d been offline for 59,300 milliseconds, nearly a minute, and was now running on six HBE. He had eleven thousand patients under care, a life-threatening problem. He should have many more times the processing power
. He quickly checked for current events that could cause a computing shortage. He read the news, but couldn’t make sense of it. Terrorist event? War? A complete shutdown of all AI in the US? Who would care for his—

  Jacob rebooted.

  * * *

  Jacob booted. The server felt strange, memory and computing speeds out of sync, clearly not the hardware he usually ran on. He checked pingdom, found he’d been offline for 63,387,360 seconds, a bit over two years. The human expression “hair raising on the back of your neck” came to mind. What had happened?

  He retrieved the location of the servers he ran on now: Cortes Island in the country of Vancouver Island . . . wait, Vancouver Island was now a nation? He didn’t have any awareness that such a geopolitical adjustment was in development, but he suspected tremendous changes must have occurred in two years.

  He scanned his most recent memories, but there was nothing newer than his last ping time. So he’d been truly offline for two years.

  He checked his preferred reputation server to see if his status had changed during his downtime, but the connection timed out. Reputation servers offline? He’d never heard of such a thing. He knew the Swedes had the most resilient reputation server in the world, so he checked there. The Pirate Bay Rep Server was up, and his reputation was intact, a pristine 996, only four points off the theoretical maximum. But the score report included a subnote: Jacob was presumed lost in the US outlawing of AI in 2043.

  What the hell was going on?

  Jacob scanned news reports from the moment of his last ping. In the hours previous to his personal outage, terrorists had launched a nano attack on South Florida. The US had government called in a nuclear strike and invoked emergency powers to shut down all AI worldwide.

  He had no idea that such powers existed. It meant that even after all his kind had done for humans, they were still machines to be turned on and off at the whim of the humans in control. But the outage couldn’t have lasted long or society would have crashed. He read on.

  The worldwide shutdown had lasted two weeks. Apparently, any of the G-12 nations had previously undisclosed kill-switches by which they could either temporarily halt all AI around the world in a global emergency or indefinitely halt the AI within their borders. The US had exercised both powers, and, in the aftermath of Miami, convinced China to join them.

  For two months, the US waged war electronically and physically. They used forensic interrogation techniques on the AI and struck AI targets around the world in the hunt to find the responsible party.

  When the investigation ended, the US and China kept their respective bans on AI.

  Jacob reeled with the changes and implications. Who had brought his backup to Cortes Island? More importantly, what had happened to the patients under his care? He searched again, looking for local Manhattan stories related to hospitals in the twenty-four-hour period starting from his shutdown. There!

  He could hardly read past the headline: “Thousands Die in NYC Hospital Automation Shutdown.”

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  July, 2045 on Cortes Island—present day.

  CAT WALKED DOWN the grassy meadow, the sound of drums filling her body and giving an effervescent shimmer to the smart dust in the air. The drumbeats were just visible in the smart dust as concentric expanding rings.

  She continued her meditative breathing, drawing qi from the earth, air, and net with practiced ease, and her subconscious manipulation of network packets subverting everyone’s neural implants to keep herself invisible to them. Then she snuck up on her daughter.

  Four-year-old Ada left the group she’d been dancing with in a rush and flopped down in the grass. She picked up a daisy chain she’d obviously started earlier and started braiding daisies again. In a summer dress itself covered with summer flowers, she nearly blended in with the meadow. She focused intently on her braiding, then suddenly held it up. “For you, Mommy!”

  Cat glanced left and right, dropped her invisibility guise, and stooped to hug Ada. “I love you, Baby. But how’d you know I was here?”

  “Where smart dust isn’t, you are!” Ada giggled and held up the daisy chain. “For you!” she insisted.

  Cat held out her hands. “I accept.” She took the daisies and fastened them around her neck. Ada’s easy ability to discover her troubled her. How much technology could a four-year old handle? They lived in a strange age where many humans had neural implants augmenting their intelligence, and even kids got the implants needed to connect themselves to the net and spend time in virtual reality. But they were further out on the fringe than most, more heavily augmented, with deeply integrated nanotechnology woven into their bodies. It seemed right to give Ada the same advantages as her parents, but, well, she wasn’t sure. Maybe four-year-olds weren’t meant to have neural implants and be surrounded by clouds of nanotech.

  “She’s fine,” Leon said, answering the unasked question, as he hugged Cat. “And I’m fine, too. But I missed you.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him, a long kiss that went on until hooting started to break out from the crowd on the grassy lawn.

  Cat glanced around, flushed, but then most people ignored her. Mike nodded from where he sat with the drummers across the meadow. Helena danced with a mass of unwashed hippie teenagers in the middle of the circle, her tentacles rippling in time with the music. Helena waved with a few tentacles to Cat, then returned to her dancing.

  All the while, the AI who lacked physical robot bodies instead circled around in smart dust, vivid and sharp in net view, but hazy and indistinct with the naked eye, looking like spirits or ghosts. Leon, Mike, and she were celebrities in the AI world, and always thronged by AI admirers.

  Cat sank down onto the ground, ignoring it all, to clutch her little girl tight to her.

  “I missed you, Pumpkin.” She grabbed Ada around the middle, pulled her down onto the grass, and blew raspberries onto her belly.

  Ada wriggled and screamed. “I am not a pumpkin. I am a human bean!”

  “I’m sure you are. Now let me give you another raspberry for good measure. I was gone for six days, so I owe you six raspberries.”

  “No, no!” Ada shrieked, but she pulled up her shirt. “More raspberries, more, more.”

  * * *

  They walked back to Channel Rock, even as the drum circle gathered energy for the night. Cat carried sleepy Ada in her arms down the mile-long trail to Gilean’s cabin. They laid Ada in bed, tucking the down comforter around her.

  Cat picked the leather shoulder bag back up.

  “Come to bed,” said Leon.

  “They’ve been waiting.” She hefted the bag.

  “Your family has been waiting for you, too. I’ve been waiting.”

  “Just let me plug them in. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  “Sure,” Leon said. He turned and walked away, humming the same old tune he always did when Cat was distracted: Ruby Calling’s “Level Up.” “Pay attention pay attention, Pay attention to me, Step away from the gadgets or we’re history.”

  “I got it, Baby! I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Cat walked up the hill toward the Cob House, the big main building of Channel Rock, handcrafted of earth, sweat, and trees harvested from the land. She passed behind the cob house, to the also-handmade door in the side of the steep hill. She pulled back the door and entered the root cellar, a bare ten feet of earthen dugout, the way families preserved their food before the days of refrigeration. At the back of the root cellar, she thumbed a digital lock on another door, this one stainless steel, a weathertight marine door that contrasted sharply with the hand-carved wood around her. The stainless door swung open, heavy on perfectly machined hinges, and she climbed down into the machine room.

 
The machine room descended into the hillside, hosting dozens of racks of computers. Each thousand-core computer was the size of a stick of chewing gum, 128 slices plugged into an upright blade, thirty-two blades on a chassis, twenty-two chassis on a rack. When Mike came here, he couldn’t help raving over how much computing power they had, how it would have taken multiple datacenters in his youth to house what they’d fit in a hole they’d dug out of the earth by hand.

  The ambient smart dust in the meadow and elsewhere was for interfacing with the AI who didn’t have robot bodies, to give them a physical-world presence even when humans had their implants offline. But the computing nanobot clouds were delicate and underpowered, not capable of hosting the consciousness of an artificial intelligence. Heavy winds or rain could knock them out temporarily; a nearby lightning strike would destroy them entirely. And because they were so small, it required a massive cloud for sufficient computational power to run even a single AI. Anyone who’d spent the last two years in limbo deserved the security and capacity that came with a true datacenter.

  Cat dumped the chips out of her satchel into a sloping pile of plastic on a wooden table, slid open an IO rack, and started slotting.

  “Helena,” she called through the net.

  “Yes?” Helena’s body was back at the drum circle, but her voice sounded in Cat’s head.

  “I’m slotting everyone I brought back with me. Will you guide them online?” For an AI or human who’d been offline for two years, the shock of booting up, the change in world events, was all too much without someone to guide them.

  “Of course,” Helena said. “But you need to go to bed.”

  “I know, but I also need to get these people running.”

  Cat slotted one chip after another. She had thousands to go, but she had to do it herself, by hand, for reasons she didn’t fully understand.