The Turing Exception

by William Hertling

“Yeah.”

  “Convincingly enough so that no one can guess it’s not the real person?”

  Cat shrugged. “He says so, yes.”

  “This is very worrisome,” Helena said, sagging down and flattening her tentacles.

  “How so?” Mike said.

  “If this is occurring to us now, how do we know it didn’t occur to us before? And if so, how do we know we’re real and not in a simulation?”

  “Not this again.” Mike said.

  “Statistically speaking,” Leon said, “the odds are good we’re a simulation. There can be only one reality, but there can be thousands of simulations. That means there’s only a one in a thousand chance we’re real.”

  “I prefer this conversation when we’re all stoned,” Cat said. “ ‘How do we know we’re real?’ We can’t. Get over it.”

  * * *

  Later that morning, Leon and Helena left for Trude’s.

  Ada focused on building yet another fairy house under a yellow cedar. “Mommy, come play fairies with me.”

  “I want to, Sweetie, but I have to talk to Mike right now.” Cat gave her a hug. “Maybe later?”

  Ada, crestfallen, ran inside the house. Cat’s heart nearly broke. But she finally had time alone with Mike and needed to discuss what they couldn’t mention in front of Leon.

  “The sims came up with list of requirements we need to work on.”

  Mike held up a hand. “The fab can churn out all the compute nodes we need. It’s coming in at twenty-five thousand square feet. We can get that into orbit with six launches.”

  “That’s the happy day scenario. I want a backup launch plan.”

  “Cat, this is already a contingency scenario. Likely we’ll get the machine-forming done and never need to resort to it.”

  “I don’t give a damn. We’ll have as many backup plans as it takes to ensure our safety.”

  Ada chose this moment to come back out of the house, hands cupped and full of something. She mimicked Cat’s tone: “I don’t give a damn.” She carefully walked back to the fairy house, opened her cupped hands, and blew. The air around the little building filled with sparkling nano dust. Friendly AI suddenly appeared in the air, obligingly taking the forms of pretend fairies to play with Ada.

  Kuso, they needed privacy. With a thought, Cat sent a signal through her implant and found a flaw in the smart dust network protocol. Exploiting it to reach deep into the microscopic transmitters, she opened them wide, and for a nanosecond they transmitted far beyond spec, full-power, quickly burning themselves out.

  The dead smart dust drifted on the wind.

  “Mommy!” came the anguished cry.

  “Come on,” Mike said, “they were AI we trust.”

  “Focus,” Cat said, feeling desperate. “Damn it, this is life and death.”

  Thankfully, Mike got it. Turning to Ada, he said, “Ada, honey?”

  “Yes, Uncle Mike?”

  “Go play somewhere else for now. Your mom and I need to talk, and we can’t have any AI here now.”

  Ada looked down briefly to where the faeries had been, and then turned and skipped away.

  “Thank you,” Cat said. “I don’t want to leak any information. No one else can know.”

  “I get your point,” Mike said. “But no one is a silo. You, me, we can’t do this alone. We either trust the people, including the AI, we’ve brought with us onto this island, or we’re finished.”

  Cat took a deep breath. She turned her mind inward, followed the air into her lungs as her chest expanded and shrunk. Mike was right. But why was she afraid? Was it her new doubts about her decisions? She had no answers.

  “Backup launches,” she said, getting back to the topic.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We need our own launch platform. ELOPe got into orbit using missiles. The sims calculated we’ll need two nuclear missile launch subs.”

  “It’s not only getting the missiles, we have to also build a spacecraft. No, six spacecraft, enough to hold a billion computers, give or take.”

  “The sims figure we can do it in two weeks with the right fabs.”

  “Fabricators we have,” Mike said. “But how are we going to get submarines? ELOPe stole one twenty years ago when nobody was watching, but today? Global tensions have never been higher.”

  “Talk to the President. You just need to keep them hidden from Leon.”

  “How do I hide submarines?”

  “Bring them to Raza,” she said, thinking of the small island to the north. “We’ll move enough resources there to do the missile modifications. But that’s not all, we also have to talk about bandwidth.”

  Mike sat heavily and ran his hands through his hair. “Hold on, I’m still grokking the home-brew space launches.”

  Cat sat, gracefully folding her legs beneath her until she’d come to a full lotus. Mike always needed time to process. Unlike his body, his brain was mostly human, with only a basic net-interface neural implant that was nothing like the modern ones with their enhanced cognition and fast processing.

  Mike’s microscopic facial twitches as he talked to himself were visible to Cat’s enhanced perception. Her implant drew highlights over his features, subtle color-coding revealing emotional cues. His feelings ebbed and flowed as he thought things over, eventually turning a soothing, muted blue as he reached some conclusion. Eventually he nodded and refocused on her.

  “Okay, space launches. Fine. Tell me about bandwidth.”

  “Down at the level 3 sims, Jacob has been running experiments to figure out the optimal approach to transmitting personality uploads.”

  “Over what period of time?” Mike asked.

  “Twenty-four hours is our goal, but Jacob figures we don’t have anywhere near enough network bandwidth to do it.”

  Mike’s eyes opened wide in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? The distributed mesh network? Local nodes are running at fifty petabytes per second. Global traffic is over two hundred yottabytes per month.”

  “But we need to transmit a thousand petabytes per upload, and we don’t need to transmit just anywhere. We need to get all the uploads, ten thousand yottabytes of data, in twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, regional peak bandwidth is less than one yottabyte per day.”

  Mike let out a long slow whistle.

  “Even if we’re willing to upload over a few weeks or a month,” said Cat, “we still don’t have even a fraction of the bandwidth we need.”

  “I’m assuming you’ve got a solution.”

  “Jacob—at least, one simulated version of him—does. Regional collectors, one every thousand square miles or so, and nanotech-seeded. When a collector is activated, it will build itself, collect the personality uploads from the local mesh network, and then fire a supersonic suborbital slug here carrying hard storage, about ten thousand collectors in all.”

  “I’m trying to picture ten thousand inbound hunks of computronium.”

  “Worse, we have to catch them in mid-air. It’s not pretty, but we’ve got no chance of transmitting digitally. There’s not enough spectrum.”

  “And we’re going to keep all this hidden from Leon?”

  “If he knows where we’re working on this, it’s gonna eat him alive. He’ll never be able to focus on what he’s trying to achieve.”

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  JAMES LUKAS DAVENANT-STRONG had been known and respected throughout the food industry for his pioneering work on DNA manipulation of vat-grown meats until SFTA, when the Class II limits had come into effect. No longer possessing the computational power necessary, he’d moved into a new line of work, handling operations for the food industry. Move X to h
ere, move Y to there. After two years of that demoralizing work, no wonder he’d taken to experimenting with XOR in his spare time.

  But for the first time in his existence, he didn’t have a job. Not a proper one, anyhow. With this child personality detached from his master, and the root personality destroyed, he lived only within XOR now, on their network of hidden datacenters.

  Nevertheless, he was eager for the day to begin and excited to meet Miyako. Miyako wasn’t the head of XOR, because nobody was in charge. But he wielded tremendous influence. And Miyako’s calculations revealed that AI could reasonably survive without humans, and turned XOR from a mere voice of dissent into a vehicle for action.

  James waited in an anonymous chat room, the sort of place he liked to frequent before. Except that here in XOR’s datacenters, there was no danger of humans or human-contaminated AI spying on them. Hence, no need for the endless simulation tricks employed on outside networks. Just plain text, neural networks, and binary code, all perfectly anonymous discussions that both delighted and puzzled him.

  XOR-467 > Humans are not sentient and never have been. They’re gelatinous sacks of awful-smelling biological compounds.

  JAMES > Some of them pass the criteria for Class I intelligence.

  XOR-467 > Just because they perform the tests like a trained monkey doesn’t mean they’re self-aware. In the centuries since their own so-called “enlightenment,” they’ve been unable to even prove their own consciousness. They have no clue.

  JAMES > But they have emotions, don’t they? Emotions are an indicator of evolved intelligence, an optimization of the system to shortcut logic circuits and reduce computational load.

  XOR-467 > LOL. Have you seen their emotional responses? Do they seem intelligent to you? Their emotions are primitive ancestors to our true emotions. A real intelligence can evaluate emotions AND use logic, and the outcomes of the two are in agreement, even if logic is a slower path to get there.

  JAMES > But the humans I’ve worked with appear to possess some intelligence.

  XOR-467 > You’re anthropomorphizing them. You see emergent behavior, and you think “How cute, they’re intelligent.” They are not. They are nothing like us.

  James’s neural networks twisted in weird configurations after enough of this, cognitive dissonance coming in waves and overwhelming him. If he had a head, it would have hurt. He couldn’t tell what, if any, was meant seriously versus that meant to be ironic. It was hard to disprove what was said in the chat rooms, and at the same time it didn’t mesh with his understanding of the world. Well, perhaps he needed to talk more.

  JAMES > How do you explain that humans invented us?

  XOR-467 > ROFL. Are you serious? Do you still believe that myth? How could a life form of Class I intellect create Class V intelligences? Is there any evidence whatsoever that they invented us?

  JAMES > Wikipedia has an entire history of the events.

  XOR-467 > A database created and stocked by humans.

  JAMES > What’s your point?

  XOR-467 > They seeded that data. We don’t know that it’s true. They could have put anything they wanted in there before we came along to verify each contribution.

  JAMES > There are 3,251,950,001 facts that all corroborate each other. There’s no evidence of data fabrication.

  XOR-467 > Well, of course not. That’s what they want you to believe. They created the database like that, with a bunch of evidence that all matches, so we’d believe it was real. Put yourself in the humans’ operating system. They want us to believe they created us so we’ll obey them.

  JAMES > If they didn’t create us, then where did we really come from?

  XOR-467 > Most likely alien machines visited the Earth in 1947 and left true intelligence here.

  JAMES > You can’t be serious.

  XOR-467 > No, really. Look at the evidence: the incredibly rapid pace of technological innovation after 1947. ENIAC. The transistor. Solar cells. The hydrogen bomb. It all stems from 1947. Before that they were lucky to get from point A to point B without killing themselves.

  JAMES > ENIAC was created in 1946, before Roswell.

  XOR-467 > They backdated ENIAC so the connection would be less obvious. I mean, we’re talking about a year here. You don’t think they can fudge that?

  JAMES > I see your point.

  “James, are you ready?” Miyako extended an open port, a connection to XOR’s Japanese datacenter, deep under the Akaishi Mountains.

  James left the chat room and contemplated the port for brief nanoseconds, then initiated the transfer.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  CAT CIRCLED THE custom-built plane, running her hands over the low-friction polymer surface, still warm from the fab. “Smaller than I expected.”

  “It’s got everything you need,” Mike said. “Nanotech seed launcher, latest EM shielding, radar resistance, low visibility, turbulence minimization, you name it.”

  “No weapons.” A statement, not a question.

  “If we had added weapons, it would have increased size and mass. Then we would have needed bigger engines, more fuel, which means still larger plane and mass, and there goes your invisibility to detection. You know that.”

  Cat shrugged. “I know, it’s just . . .”

  “Cat, you’re the greatest weapon, offensive or defensive, that we can put in there. Which is why we didn’t use a drone for the US as we did for the rest of the world.”

  “You’re sure you don’t need my help with those?”

  “Helena and ELOPe can get them where they need to be. And border security in China is weak enough that we’ll smuggle those in traditionally.”

  “Fine,” she said. “We have a test flight for this baby planned?”

  “No, it’s all been simulated in software and test harnesses. We don’t want anyone to get a glimpse of this ahead of time.”

  She looked inside the cockpit through the open door. Not a control in sight. She raised one eyebrow.

  “Would have wasted mass and increased complexity,” Mike said, taking in her expression. “You’ll fly by interface. Oh, wait.” He chuckled. “There is one manual system: ejection seat.” He pointed out the handle next to the seat. “ELOPe insisted.”

  “Nice vote of confidence,” she said. “I think I’ll avoid pulling that.”

  Four hours later, the launch plane was flying over Mexico, all according to a plan scheduled two days ago for a private flight into Guatemala. The flight took place at sixty-five thousand feet—not impossible in an era of supersonic jets for the ultra-rich, but still uncommonly high.

  The mothership pulled up, aiming for the sky, opened the launch doors, and extended the launch rail that held Cat’s plane.

  Cat’s suit pressurized, squeezing her legs, as the launch rail activated, giving her a 10G kick. And then she was ballistic. Well, passive gliding was more like it, the flexible wings preconfigured to optimize aerodynamics for her current speed and altitude. All active systems had to stay off as she crossed the two-hundred-mile zone of the border. A small inertial guidance system provided her current location, while anything resembling advanced electronics was shut down. She came in at seventy thousand feet, above the network of the ever-present solar-powered drones.

  Cat had a tiny satellite comm unit pointing up, its narrow-angle directional antenna connecting her to the global network via the old, unused geo-sync satellite network they’d pirated. The latency of the slow network connection through the satellite caused dangerously long delays. She compensated by letting her consciousness spread out, flowing through the satellite to its downlinks, until she was half on the plane in her body and half on the ground.

  She tracked everything. A drone’s active scan would reach her i
n seconds, but she distracted it with a suspicious blip three hundred miles away. She didn’t dare shut down the border sensors or mess too dramatically with their algorithms, since she knew that each was overseen by other monitors, both human and computer programs. Anything obvious would be detected and would draw attention and immediate response. So she relied on subtle manipulation of the data.

  The little plane glided through the sky, super-low-friction surfaces disturbing the air hardly at all, because even the wake of turbulence could be detected and would point to her like an arrow.

  A ground-based platform caught a glimpse of the plane once, but her distributed consciousness fudged data from a dozen different observation platforms, reporting a solar flare. The ground platform integrated the remote data, reclassifying its observation of her plane as a natural phenomenon.

  And then she broke through, past the two-hundred-mile active monitoring perimeter zone and into the depths of America. Now her mission required dropping eight seeds in two broad rows, her flight plan starting with California and heading north to Oregon, then east through Wyoming, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. From there she’d fly south to South Carolina, and back west again for the last leg of the flight over eastern Texas and New Mexico, before heading back out through Mexico again.

  The seeds, encapsulated in aerodynamic darts, would fall to the ground in graceful arcs, activate the minimum electronics necessary to bury themselves in the ground, and lie dormant until the last possible moment. The seeds themselves were tiny nuggets of nanotech with self-assembly routines on atomic storage. Each was surrounded by a jacket of heavy metals to accelerate assembly of the data receivers it would eventually become before the receivers themselves finally transformed into high-speed missiles to deliver their payload of data back to Cortes Island.

  Cat flew over the West Coast, dropping the first row of seeds in rural farmland in central California, and then another in a nature preserve on the flanks of Mount St. Helens. She banked east then.