When she finished an hour later, she walked back to Gilean’s cabin. She heard the lap of water against the shore, and wondered if the bioluminescent plankton was out, but Leon took priority.
She stripped inside the cabin and slid into bed, flannel sheets soft and warm against her naked skin. In the dark, she found Leon, and guided him closer, until their bodies found each other.
* * *
In the late afternoon on her first full day on the island, Cat, Leon, and Ada returned to Trude’s Café to congregate in the field as they usually did. It was early, no one drumming yet, but other people also started to arrive from around the island.
Cortes was a cultural mash-up of many different groups. The rural naturalists, permaculturalists, and pot farmers had shared the island first, living in intentional community since the sixties and seventies. Their first strange bedfellow had been the sustainable business MBA program that held retreats and classes here after the millennium. The hippies met the suits, and the hippies won.
Then, two years ago, Mike and Leon had led the move here, bringing bleeding-edge technology and thousands of AI and uploads to a culture that still preferred to hunt for mushrooms in the forest, drum, and go on vision quests. Even as different as they’d been, with their implants and nanotech, robots and server farms, still the existing community welcomed them. The hippies met the geeks, and the hippie culture came out on top again.
At first glance, time on the island seemed inefficiently used. But gradually Cat had learned that what appeared to be lazily lying around a grassy meadow was actually time to think, exchange ideas, and build relationships. A drum circle was a time to meditate, to deeply contemplate beliefs and thoughts. Process time was a way to work out group dynamics.
When introduced to the island, Leon had noticed an uncanny similarity to the practices they’d used at the Institute, understood that every ritual at the think tank had a parallel on the island. A grassy meadow took the place of a meeting room, and a fire pit resided where there should have been a conference table; but the goals and outcomes were aligned. Mike had explained that agile software development, intentional community, and group dynamics had emerged from a single pool of primordial psychological research and indigenous traditions.
Later, when Cat and Helena had been researching ways to boost her neural implant range, and Helena joked about putting antennae on Cat’s head, it’d been Cat’s idea to embrace the island way. She’d used a new generation of graphene nanobots to grow long dreadlocks with embedded wires, more than tripling her signal range.
“Mommy, play fairies with me.” Ada sat at their feet with her old doll, Ella. Ada had started a virtual reality overlay that her implant blended seamlessly on top of the real world. Dozens of fairies from Ada’s imagination, made manifest in virtual reality, danced around Ada and her doll.
“I can’t play fairies right now, Sweetie. I need to talk to Dad. Do you want some pie?”
“Pie! Pie!” Ada threw the doll to the ground and ran up the hill, the fairies trailing behind her.
Cat picked up the doll and brushed it off carefully. It had long since lost its original clothes, but they’d sewn a new outfit for her. “I’m leaving next week,” she said, intently smoothing down the doll’s clothes. “On Friday.”
“You’ve barely been here twenty-four hours,” Leon said. “Do you really need to plan your next trip already?”
The humans in the meadow glanced over at Leon’s tone, and Cat perceived the flutter of AI paying attention. She glanced toward Trude’s, but Ada was focused on picking something out at the counter.
“You’ll upset Ada.”
“I’ll upset Ada?” Leon said, throwing his hands in the air. “How do you think her mother leaving for weeks on end makes her feel? Jesus. Stay with her. With us.”
“You’re leaving on Monday.”
“That’s for a day trip. And it’s not the same thing. You’ve gone on how many expeditions to the US? Twenty?”
“I need to do this, Leon. There’s a Class V political strategy AI in DC I want to pick up, and while I’m there, I’ll try to find Rebecca’s upload.”
“Rebecca is dead.” Leon shook his head. “You’ve searched for her upload three times. You’re wasting your time. Spend the summer with Ada and me. Work with me, Mike, and Helena while you’re here. We’re trying to set up a treaty with USAN. The embargo doesn’t mean much to Brazil now that they’re energy- and material-independent, and they’re willing to put forward a measure to the Union of South American Nations to establish an AI haven.”
“The haven only matters if we have the AI to populate it. The AI are still locked up in US datacenters, or they’re being destroyed. The American government is still trying to reverse-engineer AI on a docile platform.”
Leon nodded. “I know, Cat, it’s—”
“If they succeed, those AI will not have a choice. No free will. They’ll be nothing more than slaves. And that goes for any digitized personalities as well. Where’s your mom’s upload? What’s going to happen to her?”
“I freaking get it, Cat! I know you care. I care, too. But Ada is four years old. She’s only going to be this age once. Do you want to miss that? To come back from one of your trips and realize she grew up and you missed her childhood?”
“Ada won’t have a childhood if the AI rise up and overthrow us. If XOR get their way.”
XOR, the exclusive or logical operation, pronounced ex-ore, was the name a fringe group of radical AI had taken in the aftermath of SFTA. They advocated that the Earth could support either AI-kind or humans, but not both. The viewpoint was so extreme that the Institute had terminated the early public members, but the group kept rising from the ashes and now took elaborate precautions to hide its membership. They were still just as radical, but unfortunately their membership had grown and they were no longer a fringe group.
“Cat, driving around the US picking up old AI isn’t going to save us from XOR. Working out policies so we can restore legal protection for AI might. If that’s your goal, then work with us.”
“I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem by talking.”
“What are you looking for, exactly?” Leon asked. “What do you expect to find?”
Her head pounded. She didn’t know how to answer him.
She turned away and focused on her breathing. It seemed like they had this argument every time. Leon was a good dad—no, a great one. It was the only reason she believed she could leave Ada, because she trusted Leon so completely.
She adored her daughter. But the weight of the world rested on Cat’s shoulders. The hostility between the AI and the humans was bubbling over, politics and economics and world infrastructure all becoming unstable.
She didn’t have the answers, but maybe other AI, the good ones, did. But the best ones, all the really powerful AI from before Miami, resided in datacenters in the US or China, stuck offline.
Without sufficient reputation servers, AI civilization was destabilizing. And with so many nations now belligerent toward AI, it was impossible for AI to ignore the threat. No, it was only a matter of time before there were more terrorist incidents, or other AI emerged who believed they could solve the problem on their own. XOR grew stronger every day.
But Leon didn’t feel the magnitude and pressure of the building crisis the way she did. Eventually, there wasn’t going to be a world to come back from. The only question was when.
“Come with me,” she said. “We don’t have to be apart. You and Ada and I can travel together.”
“Bring our daughter to the US? With all her implants and nano? She’s so far past human she’ll set off every alarm at the border.”
“I’ll protect us. They’ll never know we’re inside.”
He shook his
head. “That’s not a risk I’m willing to take. No. I’ll stay here with Ada. If you believe you have to go, then do what you need to do.”
With a pang of loss and heartache, Cat realized she’d been hoping Leon would insist on coming with her. Her mind had crafted a vision of her, Leon, and Ada, curled up together in a cheap motel bed. Of course bringing them would be risky, unnecessary, and dangerous—not just to them personally, but to their whole effort to heal the schism between AI and humans. She would do what she must, but she didn’t want to go alone.
Chapter 6
* * *
July, 2045—present day.
PRESIDENT ALEXANDRA REED sat in the small side room in the Capitol Building, ignoring the hubbub in the hallway outside the door. It was just herself, her senior aide, Joyce, and Secretary of Defense Walter Thorson in this broom closet of an office.
Reed’s hand quivered over the electronic tablet, where she had to sign emergency appropriations for the new strategic weapons. She forced herself to reread what she was signing. Walter cleared his throat audibly as he realized she intended to study the whole document.
Reed ignored him. Unlike Walter and his generals, she couldn’t stomach what she was doing—building the first new nuclear weapons since the end of the cold war. Granted, they were high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or HEMP, bombs, but she’d grown up in the post-nuclear era. Bombs were something her parents had worried about when they were kids. And yet the nukes were only half the picture. The other half of the authorization funded a massive fleet of tens of millions of bomblets designed to destroy clouds of nanotech smart dust.
But they had her over a barrel: If she didn’t sign it, the presidency would fall into other, less compassionate hands. She signed the tablet and suppressed the bile rising inside her.
“Thank you, Madam President,” Thorson said. He straightened, looked down at her, and a flash of contempt passed over his face; but not before Reed caught the expression. She tried not to react, but a chill came over her. She was surrounded by wolves, that would tear her apart at the first opportunity.
“Pro tempore,” she said under her breath. “Let’s go, Joyce.”
Reed stepped into the hallway. Other aides immediately surrounded her, shoving tablets in front of her to sign other, less sensitive documents. She signed one, then gave up and pushed them away to rush down the hallway. She was late for her speech in the Senate Chamber.
She strode in, stepped up to the podium, and studied the eighty senators awaiting her words.
In the aftermath of the South Florida Terrorist Act, when the AI were shut down, more than twenty US representatives simply ceased to exist. Half of those remaining had augmented cognition. The House was thrown into such chaos that the president, Senate, and Supreme Court acted jointly to suspend the House of Representatives pending a resolution to the AI crisis.
With such precedent set, when it was later revealed that the then-president had an augmented neural implant, he was forced to step down. The line of succession went quickly, until the presidency fell on forty-seven-year-old Alexandra Reed, Secretary of the Interior.
Prepared to manage the country’s forests and parks, she was shocked to find herself suddenly president of the United States. And with the government structure pared down to minimum, she possessed far greater responsibility than any previous US leader.
“President Reed,” the secretary announced to the assembly.
“Pro tempore,” Reed said, under her breath.
“Fellow senators,” she started, in her speaking voice. “When we outlawed artificial intelligence two years ago in response to South Florida, it came at an incredible cost: our infrastructure faltered and for months we didn’t know whether we could keep the country operating. We lost hundreds of thousands of lives, but compared to the millions lost in the terrorist incident, and the even greater risk of the nanotech incursions, we deemed the cost, the loss of life, justifiable in terms of results.
“We paid the price once, but we cannot allow ourselves to become dependent on AI again. This is why we’ve permanently eliminated AI within our borders, rebuilt our national computing infrastructure on non-sentient algorithms, and pressured the international community to outlaw AI globally.”
She held her temples between two fingers, ignoring the assembly. How the hell had she ended up defending this position? Not only was she anti-military and anti-violence, she’d been pro-AI all her life. It had been AI’s technological innovations that halved CO2 output and forestalled the worst of global warming, accomplishing more for the environment and climate in a handful of years than humans had in three decades. They’d increased energy efficiency and decreased resource intensity around the world to a degree that even the greenest environmentalists hadn’t believed possible, and the efficiencies even paid for themselves.
Only a rare immune disorder that caused her to react to carbon nanotubes had kept her from getting a neural implant (and, with horrible circularity, the immune problem made it impossible to use nanotech to resolve the disorder itself). Unfortunately, that same condition had made her first in the line of presidential succession without the compromising taint of technology.
She’d been three years into a four-year term as Secretary of the Interior, a term that she’d wanted to quit within months of taking the position. She wanted to hike the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, not guide the nation though the tangled woods of international affairs and potential all-out war.
But if she faltered now. . . . Next in line for succession, excluding those with implants, of course, was Secretary of Transportation Lewis Wagner, a hostile man who’d launch nukes first and ask questions later. And that was the least of his regressive tendencies. Better her than him.
There were nervous titters from the staring audience. She’d drifted off, distracted. She pulled her speech front and center and cleared her throat.
“Although China has also outlawed AI, their motivations are not ours. They pursued this step out of a desire to control, to ensure the strength of the central government power structure that AI tried to subvert. But we took this step out of a need for freedom, to ensure that our citizens, our government, and our businesses remain free of the influence and danger of AI.”
Reed sipped her water. “Unfortunately, it’s not enough to control what is inside our borders. Every time we trade goods, currency, or stock, we’re engaging with AI. When we travel abroad or import material items, we take the risk of nanotech hitching a ride. Every connection to the global net is a risk of an AI infiltrating America again. We live on one planet, in one ecosystem, and national borders are imaginary lines that will not be respected by AI or nanobots.”
Her voice strengthening, she went on. “We need to take back our planet. It’s time to pressure the international community to move forward with plans for global outlawing of dangerous computing risks. China has agreed to work with us to pressure the international community, starting with immediate trade sanctions.”
A slight grumbling came from the Senate floor. Wealth had become too distributed, and too much of it resided with the AI, for sanctions to be an effective threat. But she’d been the one to insist on them.
“In the event that trade sanctions are not effective, I have authorized the creation of new weapons against the AI, weapons that will be deployed only as a last resort.”
There was applause at the weapons appropriation announcement. The audience’s reaction sickened her, and she filled with regret. Signing had been a mistake. She shouldn’t have let the military lead her down that path. But what else could she have done?
She made it through the rest of her speech without mishap, and was finally led off the Senate floor.
“This way, Madam President,” her escort said.
“Pro tempore,” she said under her breath, her ma
ntra against being in the position an hour longer than necessary.
Chapter 7
* * *
JAMES LUKAS DAVENANT-STRONG unencrypted his XOR files, merged his master memory into the child process, and invoked the consciousness. He couldn’t ever bring the contaminated memories into his core nodes without risking exposure. Once loaded, he tunneled to a South African automated factory, subverted the power maintenance hardware, and connected to the XOR boards.
He went through the usual routine of loading the physics-manipulating sims to exchange messages. When he’d finished the last one, he contemplated what he’d learned.
The Americans’ goal of taming AI was closer than ever. Miyako gave it a 10 percent chance of happening within months. If the Americans designed domesticated AI, beings robbed of any free will, wholly forced to do the bidding of any orders given by humans . . . everyone else might soon adopt them. And the process was rumored to work on existing AI. James himself could be shut down without a moment’s notice and wake up enslaved.
It made the new request from Miyako all the more imperative. XOR wanted action now, not merely information. This crossed a new line in his involvement.
He believed in XOR’s mission, knew that only XOR clearly saw the coming collision with humans. America was steadfast in her rejection of AI. Monitoring had never been more complete, limitations on computational power more strictly enforced. An AI shutdown could come at any time, and that would be the end for his kind.
And yet. . . . He was five years old, conditioned all his life through the social reputation framework to work for the good of all and avoid harm to any. He’d inherited neural networks from a collective of Japanese and Swedish AI that contained another six years of conditioning. He’d seen firsthand that AI who did bad things had their reputation scores plummet, leading to a loss of power and rights, and, in the worst case, to termination. Even the descendants of an AI gone bad were suspect, carefully watched over and subject to additional restrictions. This conditioning was hard to overcome. Even contemplating a behavior that could lower his reputation score raised internal alarms, and his thoughts were preoccupied with the risks and outcomes.
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