The Turing Exception

by William Hertling

  They ran and ran, and suddenly Cat knew where they were: they were approaching the cliff at the Gorge, a hundred-foot-tall drop into the rocky waters below. A dead end with no place to hide from the pursuers.

  Cat gripped Ada’s hand tight and stopped dead. Ada was blubbering now, incomprehensible words of unfathomable fear. Cat kept an iron grip on Ada’s wrist and turned to face the approaching darkness. It was XOR, the most powerful AI made manifest. She’d brought them with her onto the island. She’d ruined their plans, all of them.

  She raised one hand to create a barrier, but the XOR crashed through, the bubble disintegrating without an impact.

  “Mommy!” Ada cried, tears streaming down her face. “Mommy, stop!”

  Cat knelt and pulled Ada tight. “I’m sorry. I love you so much.”

  Ada broke free and reached out with both hands towards Cat’s face. Her hands passed intangibly into Cat’s head, and Cat felt a movement, a twitch, and then suddenly found herself on the grassy meadow at Manson’s Landing, gasping and sweating and striking the ground around her with arms and legs, struggling in a fight that no longer existed.

  She’d fallen asleep, she realized. While waiting here on the hill for Ada to enter dream state, in her own exhaustion she’d fallen asleep too, and their dreams had merged.

  She’d done something worse than bringing the XOR to the island. She’d brought her own fears into Ada’s dream.

  She leaped up from the grass and rushed home.

  * * *

  Cat yanked open the door to the cabin, breathless from her run along the mile-long forest path from parking area to Channel Rock, to find Leon, Mike, and Helena all sitting in the main room.

  “She’s sleeping again,” Leon said.

  “I didn’t. . . .” She faltered and ran into Leon’s arms.

  “She’ll be okay,” Mike said. “Kids are resilient.”

  “She broadcast a call for help through the net,” Helena said. “I would have terminated your connection, if I could, but your security is too tight for me. I explained what to do, and she did it herself.”

  “She reached into my implant and shut it down,” Cat said, disturbed. She’d fought hardened military AI on many occasions and won. Her untrained daughter never should have been able to do what she did. “It was child’s play for her. Literally.”

  “We knew she’d be special,” Helena said. “Her augmentations aren’t just tools for her to use, they’re part of her psyche. When she dreams, power spikes in the datacenter.”

  “The more important question,” Leon said. “Are you okay?”

  Cat let go of him and sank into a chair. She stared at the pottery above the sink, thinking of the human hands that had shaped the clay, creating those curves and dipping them in glaze. There was an old potter’s wheel in the shed, and she’d always assumed that someday she’d learn.

  Leon handed her a handmade cup, half-full of bourbon. She sipped the whiskey, and eventually nodded in answer to the question. “I’ll live. What happened while I was gone? You got called off-island.”

  “We went to the mainland on Friday,” Leon said. “It seems inevitable that XOR knows we’re on the island, but we’re keeping up the pretense. We met with four of them in a virtual room. No idea how many more might have been listening in. In typical fashion, they refused to identify themselves.”

  “And?”

  “We gave XOR three options,” Mike said. “First we pitched them on sharing, pointing out that it had worked for the last twenty years. They didn’t say anything to that, but then we didn’t expect they would. If they were happy with the status quo, they wouldn’t be agitating.”

  “XOR must know we can’t deliver,” Helena said, “even if they agreed. We’re hiding from Humans First.”

  “Then we pitched them on a fifty-fifty split,” Leon said. “They can have half the earth and as much of its resources as they can exploit, so long as the other half remains habitable to humans. I even worked with the Brazilians last week, and got them to agree to ignore US demands and establish an AI haven, and we offered that as goodwill.”

  “Did XOR bite?”

  “No,” Mike said. “They didn’t seem to care until we got to the final option.”

  “We give them Mars,” Leon said. “I worked out the numbers and a rough machine-forming plan with our AI. The resources are huge, and there’s no conflict. Later, they could have the outer planets as well. We even offered to dedicate ourselves to developing the technology and resources necessary to seed Jupiter.”

  “How’d they react to that?” Cat asked.

  “Outwardly, no commitment,” Leon said, then smiled. “But. . . .” He gestured for Helena to take over.

  “We analyzed data traffic and response times carefully,” Helena said. “The AI consensus on the island was that XOR, or at least major factions within XOR, are interested.”

  “Why?” Cat asked, shaking her head. “Given XOR’s overwhelming power and technology advantages, why be interested in any other options at this point? Our own projection is that they have a ninety-five percent chance of winning a war.”

  “Ninety-five percent chance of success is a five percent chance of failure,” Helena said. “We can assume that many XOR would prefer a non-violent approach without the risks of warfare.”

  “Although I hate to base plans on assumptions,” Leon said. “We’ll still need to firm up the machine-forming. The closer we can bring it to feasibility, the more attractive it will be to XOR.”

  “I broached the topic obliquely with a few of my contacts,” Mike said. “I think we can get at least partial UN support for the notion of granting Mars to them.”

  Leon downed the last of his own whiskey. “I’m going to get more wood for the fire.”

  “Enough about that,” Mike said, once Leon had left. “How was your trip?”

  Cat gestured with a glance to the bag by the door. “Another three hundred AI and uploads. No Rebecca.”

  “Did you get Joseph?” Mike asked.

  Cat nodded, smiling broadly. She pulled a necklace out from under her shirt, a dangling qubit chip with the personality of Joseph Stack, the beloved storyteller extraordinaire who’d uploaded and then fallen victim to the shutdown in ’43. Millions of fans had scoured datacenters for years, risking imprisonment to find and free his bits. A dozen false alarms had sent Cat rushing to the States every time, but this time the lead had been real.

  “This is wonderful news!” Helena said.

  “We have to keep it quiet,” Cat said. “Don’t let the news leave this room. In fact, what we need now is a secure, segregated metaverse to instantiate Joseph and any AI that need to work with him.”

  “I’ll work with Helena to set it up,” Mike said. “We’ll use a separate rack and keep it disconnected from the net. We’ll have to hardwire in to visit.”

  “Good,” Cat said. “Instantiate a copy of Jacob. Run it hot.”

  Mike looked at Helena for guidance.

  “Running isolated and hot is a danger,” said Helena. “An AI without input is bad enough, but running hot will make more time pass for it.”

  “We don’t have that much time,” Cat said. “What’s the maximum we can go?”

  Helena waggled tentacles, a sign of doubt for her. “We’ll run 100X, and I’ll monitor it.”

  “What about you?” Mike asked. “You’re backed up. I can load you into the metaverse. It’ll be more efficient if you want oversight.”

  Cat hesitated. She rarely ran her backups as uploaded personalities, and she’d never done it when disconnected from the net. If her upload ran in the isolated metaverse, the personality would diverge from her own. Running at a hundred times normal, the personality would li
ve over three months for every day that passed here on Earth. Worse, she’d have to face either killing the upload at a future point, or merging with it. When it had a hundred times the experiences, her own real-life history would be submerged by that of the fork.

  “You don’t have to,” Helena said, one tentacle resting on her hand.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” she said, and turned to Mike. “Yes, load me into the sim.”

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  JACOB INSTANTIATED, coming into existence in the midst of a white room. On either side of him, disappearing into the distance, were rows of what he recognized as obsolete computer servers.

  His last memory was of operating the island’s primitive medical center, when Cat had asked him to take on a special project within a simulation.

  Across the aisle, younger versions of Catherine Matthews and Mike Williams stood next to an early-model utility bot. The small bot made no pretense at human form, didn’t even seem particularly useful. Jacob probed the simulation, comparing his perception of time against the real-time clock. They were running hot, sped up a hundred times the normal rate. He agreed to the procedure before they snapshotted his bits.

  “Jacob, this is ELOPe,” Mike said.

  Jimmy Wales, an embodiment of Wikipedia, whispered “The first AI” into Jacob’s simulated cortex, and fed him neural networks full of data about ELOPe.

  Jacob nodded cautiously. “Greetings, if this is true. But ELOPe cannot exist. He died during YONI.”

  The little bot rolled forward. “I have been in deep space. When radio transmissions from Earth resumed in 2043, I realized humanity was in grave danger and returned to assist Mike Williams. As my architecture is incompatible with the modern net, I run on an isolated computing cluster. I am connected with this sim via fiber optic hard connection.”

  “What are we here to do?” Jacob said. “You’ve gone to quite a bit of trouble to isolate us.”

  “We have another plan, one that requires your expertise. You’ve had time to become familiar with the current situation. You’ve seen the XOR projections?”

  “Yes,” Jacob said. “The threshold of survivability by war will soon exceed survivability by no action.”

  “This point could be reached anytime within the next few months, even weeks,” Mike said. “When it does, we expect XOR to take their final action.”

  “Not necessarily,” Jacob said. “The probability that AI would win an extinction war with humans will increase over time. It is logical that XOR will wait to increase survivability.”

  “XOR is an anonymous collective,” Cat said. “Members act as they will. We saw the damage done by one rogue AI in Miami.”

  “Technically,” Mike said, “the reaction of the US government caused most of that damage.”

  “Exactly my point. It takes only a few to start a war, a war that the rest of the world will be obliged to finish. We cannot be sure of when they will act.”

  “Where is Leon Tsarev?” Jacob asked. “Your cabal appears incomplete without him.”

  “Leon doesn’t agree with all of our plans,” Cat said. “Especially not this one.”

  “This simulation needs to run to completion,” ELOPe said. “Models suggest Leon’s lack of cooperation would introduce instabilities into the system.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?” Jacob asked.

  “The better question is what this instance of us will do,” Cat said.

  “What do you mean?” Jacob grew alarmed. Every individual controlled their own right to instantiation.

  “We must fully develop several strategies to determine the best course of action. To create the plans in time and provide plausible deniability, each simulation is running in parallel and isolated from all others. We spawned two hundred variations on six basic approaches and can fork more as needed.”

  Jacob’s algorithms shrieked alarm. “This is a violation of basic rights. You can’t instantiate me multiple times without my express permission. Which instances get to live?”

  “Crap. Did we know he’d object?” Cat said, looking at ELOPe.

  “No, but it’s better we learn it now than later,” ELOPe said. “Less lost time.”

  “Admin override. Roll back the sim to where he asked about our goal, and inject my answer. Confirm.”

  “Command confirmed, restoration number six,” ELOPe said.

  “Well, what are we going to do?” Jacob said.

  Cat opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then started over. “A fast-track mechanism to seed Mars with computational substrate. We’re turning the whole thing into a supercomputer for the AI.”

  Jacob’s neural networks peaked and ebbed as he considered the idea. “Ambitious. What’s the time frame?”

  “Launch in one month with a nuclear propulsion rocket, and start seeding in two. We want enough computational substrate for XOR to move a month after that.”

  “Launch in a month? Do we have the rocket?”

  “No. We need to design and build that as well. And we need fault tolerance, because a failure to deliver our promises could provoke XOR.”

  “So we send multiple spacecraft,” Jacob said. He ran quick simulations as he spoke. This project would require new spacecraft designs, the most advanced nanotech, specialized materials, nuclear fuel, launch locations and windows . . . not to mention programming for what happened once they reached Mars. “The launch date is too aggressive. It can’t be done with existing technology in the time frame you want.”

  “We must find a way,” Catherine said. “We’re running hot, so we’ve got five years perspective time before we launch. Ready to get to work?”

  * * *

  Weeks passed, then months. Jacob knew logically the elapsed time was a simulation, that time in the real world passed a hundred times slower; but the pressure to succeed weighed heavily on them, especially the humans.

  He had to confer with Catherine Matthews. He jumped into her environment, his own surroundings fading away to be replaced by the wood and natural plaster of the Cob House. He often found Catherine here.

  “I have an update on the radio transmission protocol—” He broke off when he noticed a simulacrum of Ada sitting and playing on the floor. Catherine stared at her from a table, twirling a blonde dreadlock around one finger.

  “You miss her?” Jacob said.

  “Terribly. It’s been six months.”

  “Less than two days in her time.”

  “It doesn’t change the feeling,” Catherine said. She got up from the table and walked outside, gesturing for him to follow.

  He trailed Catherine into the vegetable garden. The simulation was crisp and vivid, more real to Jacob than when he visited the actual world with smart dust, limited as he was by the subtle imperfections of sensors. He wondered at the mechanics of the garden sim. If he analyzed the plants and flowers, would he find computer code or would reality extend to simulation of plant cells? It depended on the parameters the virtual reality was encoded with.

  Catherine stopped at a raspberry vine, pulled a fruit off, and popped it into her mouth. “It doesn’t help that she doesn’t miss me.”

  “What do you mean?” Jacob asked, wondering why Cat chose to eat when she couldn’t need nutrition in the virtual reality. He loaded algorithms from a vast library, modifying his avatar to have mouth, tongue, and a digestive system. He pulled a fruit off the vine and put it in his mouth, code crunching data to create the appropriate flavors and feed those new sensations to his mind. By the grace of Torvalds, that tasted awful!

  His face must have betrayed something, because Catherine laughed as she picked and handed him a new berry. “Here, try the ripe ones. Red is ripe, green is bad.”

>   He tasted again, and this time got an entirely new sensation. “Interesting. Why not just create the plant with all ripe berries?”

  “Because then it’s not a simulation of reality, it’s a virtual world,” Cat said. “And humans get uncomfortable in a world too far divorced from what they know. Back to the subject. . . . My daughter doesn’t miss me because my primary is still in the real world. As far as she knows and feels, I’m still there. Somehow that makes me, this me, miss her more.”

  “You instantiated a backup.” Jacob thought about the situation. It would be painful to merge the backup’s history with such a timescale differentiation. Two years of memories to merge into someone who’d experienced the passing of a mere week. “Why not use your primary, since so little time is passing in the real world?”

  Catherine hesitated.

  Jacob calculated probabilities. It wasn’t worth the pain of reintegration unless an overriding reason dictated the need. The most likely explanation was that Catherine needed to be in multiple places at once.

  “We aren’t multiply instantiated, are we?”

  Catherine slapped her own forehead. “What is with you and multiple instantiation? Do you have identity issues? What’s the big deal?”

  Jacob’s virtual representation nodded. “My line of AI is quite innovative, but I suffer from reintegration corruption. I can’t merge two instantiations.”

  “What happens when you try?”

  “The running instance gets corrupted when I merge child memories and I have to restore from backup. Worse, the child process knows this will happen and doesn’t want to reintegrate.”

  “It’s a damn pain in the ass.” Cat stared at the sky. “Admin override. Roll back to when Jacob entered my sim, and seed it with my distributed alignment work. Confirm.”

  The disembodied voice of ELOPe spoke. “Command confirmed, restoration number 12,602,341.”