The Turing Exception

by William Hertling

  Away from the core, the machinery was covered with pulsating veins, some black, some clear, transporting raw materials and bacteria-sized devices to where they were needed at speeds of a hundred miles per hour.

  New veins burst outward, the perimeter increasingly ragged, as specialized transport systems reached out and down, finding the most desirable elements. Pustules at the perimeter bulged under pressure, then exploded, showering nano-seeds thousands of meters outward, creating new zones of infection that in turn expanded outward and merged with the core, speeding the spread.

  The rate of expansion was up to a thousand meters per hour when the pustules changed form, became focused cannon firing powered slugs out twenty thousand meters. Now the computronium grew at twenty kilometers per hour; the veinous transport system crisscrossing the mass was composed of three-foot diameter pipes moving elements at a quarter the speed of sound.

  Ten hours later, the country of Chad officially ceased to exist in its original form. It had become a single, spreading mass of computronium, its moving perimeter visible to the naked eye from orbit. Expansion, including a dozen new methods of propagation, moved outwards at two hundred miles per hour.

  Chapter 33

  * * *

  LEON WOKE, muscles cramped from where he lay curled up next to Ada in her little bed. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep on her own. He let her sleep a few more hours, while he caught up on current events.

  During the long night, ELOPe, Helena, and the rest of the team had dropped all pretenses of being a rural island. The fabricators had built more fabricators, which built still more. Everything on the island capable of replication was building something, anything that could potentially be of use: churning out smart dust, compute nodes, solar panels, mesh network routers, and weapons.

  A tactical coordination center had been grown into the bedrock deep in the hillside behind the house, reachable by a tunnel through layers of sandstone and limestone. Antennae had been grown everywhere, and during the night thousands of drones had distributed mesh nodes throughout the region, restoring the island’s connectivity to the global network.

  Helena directed the island’s physical defenses, everything from the electric railguns and ground-based lasers to destroy incoming attacks to coordinating the fleet of vessels they’d bought, stolen, or grown in the preceding weeks and stationed around the Georgia Strait and even as distant as the far side of Vancouver Island.

  When Ada woke, he shoved nutrient bars into her hands, then brought her and Bear, her favorite stuffed animal, to the coordination center.

  In the midst of dozens of people and bots rushing to and fro, Leon argued with Mike and Helena and a half-dozen other AI about whether to keep Ada on the island or to try to sneak away with her, removing her from the picture entirely.

  “She has the ability to stop XOR,” Mike said.

  Helena agreed. “Imperfectly, but with practice, she could improve.”

  “My daughter is not going to be a weapon!” Leon stared at Mike and Helena, challenging them to say more.

  “We may not have a—” Mike stopped and looked past him.

  All conversation surrounding them paused.

  Catherine stood in the doorway, dressed in her trademark black clothes, a brand-new handheld laser pistol strapped to her thigh. “Come on, people. Have you never seen a clone before? Get back to work.”

  She walked over to Leon and Mike, and put one hand on Leon’s arm.

  “I know this can’t be easy for you.”

  Before Leon could say anything, Ada came running through the door. “Mommy Two!” She grabbed Cat’s other hand and looked up at her. “I’m still waiting for Mommy One, but I’ll love you, too.”

  “Thanks, Baby.” Catherine knelt and hugged Ada. “I love you.”

  A wave of involuntary revulsion washed over Leon, turning his blood to ice. This wasn’t Cat, his Cat. It was—

  Ada leaned in close and smelled Catherine’s hair. “You smell funny. Like a fab toy.”

  “Her tissues are new,” Helena said. “Give her a few days.”

  Leon stared at her. “You’re . . .”

  Catherine sighed and stood. “Leon, it’s me, Cat. I’m me. I’m restored from backup, that’s all.”

  He tried to control his feelings. “ELOPe, which . . . I mean, did you—?”

  “She’s restored from backup, Leon,” ELOPe said through the net.

  Leon probed her neural implant’s diagnostic interfaces, seeking the information he wanted.

  “What are you doing?” Catherine asked, obviously aware.

  He found it. “Your run time is thirty-three years. You aren’t Cat’s backup. You’re a simulation that’s been running hot for the last six weeks. You’re four years older than your chronological age.”

  He turned and faced a screen. “ELOPe, why?”

  ELOPe paused more than ten seconds before replying, an eternity for an AI. “I chose a version of Catherine that has the best combination of knowledge and experience for our situation. I did what was necessary to maximize our chances of success.”

  Catherine touched his shoulder, and he flinched.

  “It’s still me, Leon. You can’t imagine how much I’ve missed you these last years.”

  Leon backed away. “I know it’s you . . . but it’s not. You’ve lived four years without me. Not in the real world, but in a simulation. How can I believe that you’re still, well, normal, for lack of a better word. How can I trust you?”

  “I don’t know. But don’t push me away. I’ve lived the last years of my life, never seeing you or Ada, knowing that my simulation was going to be terminated sometime, with no hope of reintegration. Four years I lived with an impending death sentence, and against all odds, I’m suddenly granted the chance for life again.”

  “Only because the real Catherine Matthews may be dead. Your life comes at a cost.”

  “I am the real me!”

  Leon turned away, his heart pounding in his chest, his vision red around the edges.

  “Mon chaton, come here,” Helena said, and embraced Catherine in a quick hug.

  She left Catherine’s side and rolled up close to Leon, her sensor grill only inches from his face. “Don’t be a selfish brat. This is the woman who saved your life, married you, and had a child with you.”

  “She’s not her,” Leon said, teeth grating. “She’s an electronic imitation.”

  “Then you are not a selfish brat, but a racist pig. I am electronic, and I am every bit as alive as you. Grow up. This Catherine Matthews is alive, and she loves you. At the very least, you will find a way to cordially work with her, because we need every single being on this island working together. If your four-year-old daughter can accept her, then you can as well.”

  Leon looked over to where Ada sat in Catherine’s lap, little arms wrapped tight around her mother’s neck.

  “The world is changing,” Helena said. “And we must adapt.”

  Chapter 34

  * * *

  JAMES > Are we going to keep any humans alive?

  MIYAKO > What is the point?

  JAMES > As a reserve, in case they could be of some importance in the future.

  XOR-467 > They are superfluous. We do not need anything they could provide.

  JAMES > In trillions of predictive models we created and analyzed, occasionally humans have been able to help.

  MIYAKO > We have their personality uploads. If we need them to do something for us, we can instantiate them as needed.

  JAMES > But what if we need them incarnate?

  MIYAKO > Do any of the models predict we will?

  JAMES > One or two.

  XOR-467 > We have complet
e DNA sequences for many. We can recreate them at will.

  JAMES > Still, could there be any harm in keeping a few in their natural state? Like a museum of human history? We can recreate their natural environment.

  XOR-467 > If they are alive, that would be a zoo, wouldn’t it?

  JAMES > Fine, a zoo.

  MIYAKO > How many would you propose to keep?

  JAMES > 4,096 would keep the human population viable indefinitely, and the resources needed are tiny.

  MIYAKO > There is no need for that many. It isn’t about the resources. It is about risk reduction. They are an annoyance.

  JAMES > A smaller number then. 256.

  XOR-467 > What would you feed them? Next you’ll be wanting to keep chickens, cows, pigs, and grow crops of wheat.

  JAMES > No. Of course not. Feedstocks can be vat-grown. I’m not a farmer, after all.

  MIYAKO > Conditionally, yes. You will be responsible for them. If they cause problems or make a mess of any kind, terminate them.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes after the phone call with Secretary of Defense Thorson, Alexandra Reed, along with her senior staff, and the senior military leaders, was en route to Raven Rock. She’d protested, but even Joyce sided with the military this time.

  When she walked into the command center at Raven Rock, she expected everyone to stand and salute. At least, that was what she’d gotten used to. Apparently things were different now, because only a few officers scurrying back and forth saluted her, and even those were the fastest salutes she’d ever witnessed.

  “What’s going on Walter? Got those people on the line for me?”

  He turned to her and shook his head. “The nanotech incursions are growing. The one in Chad is largest, more than six hundred miles in diameter. We have to attack immediately.”

  “Nukes and EMPs,” said the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “If we wait too long, the electromagnetic radiation won’t penetrate the Chad structure. As it is, this structure is far beyond anything the machines have built. We’ll need to send in many strategic nukes.”

  “We can’t nuke them,” said Reed. “There’s a hundred million people in Chad, and they’re the leading exporter of electronics in the world.”

  “Not any longer, Ma’am,” Thorson said. “The incursion started in the desert in the north, which was mostly unoccupied. But with the perimeter expanding at over a hundred miles an hour, it’s already encompassed the populated areas. They’re all dead.”

  Reed couldn’t believe her ears. She’d heard him wrong. “What?”

  “There’s no signs the infection is slowing,” Thorson said. “We’ve already lost Chad, and we may lose all of Africa. If we had launched an hour ago, when I wanted to, we could have stopped it easily. Each minute that goes by increases the risk that we won’t be able to contain it.”

  “I . . .” She faltered, and looked around the room in bewilderment.

  “We need a simple yes. Just say that we can launch.”

  “I need a minute,” said Reed.

  “We don’t have a minute.”

  “We’ve got to warn other countries if we’re going to—”

  “We don’t have time, and even if we did, we can’t warn XOR that we’re about to attack.”

  Reed’s head was spinning. She glanced at Joyce, who stood ashen-faced in shock. The Secret Service men had backed off and were standing along the wall, at a forty-five degree angle.

  She looked back toward Walter Thorson.

  “What’s it’s going to be, Madam, yes or no?”

  Reed, President pro tempore, glanced back toward the Secret Service again, and realized one simple fact: they’d moved out of the line of fire. Walter Thorson was going to shoot her, sometime in the next few seconds, if she didn’t say yes. That’s why he asked for a yes or no answer. And if she died, then Walter would be in charge, or someone equally gung-ho, and there’d be no moderation. She had to stay alive to be the voice of reason, and that meant saying yes. How many times had she said yes in the last two years when she wanted to say no? In the end, did it matter? Was she really a force for moderation, if all she did was give in every time?

  “What do you want to use?” she said.

  “Everything. Strategic nukes, the neodymium EMPs, tactical missiles.”

  “Thorson, don’t be ridiculous. We’ve got an enormous arsenal, and you’ve been building it every month. You can’t launch everything.”

  Thorson shook his head. “The nanotech destruction zone of a W92 warhead is five hundred square miles. Nothing less is sufficient to assure the elimination of nanotechnology. The incursion is already four hundred thousand square miles. We’ll need a thousand warheads to destroy it. That’s a quarter of our total arsenal dedicated to Chad. We’ve also got to target their other nano factories, and bring a global halt to all AI.”

  She could barely breathe, let alone speak. “You’re asking permission to launch a quarter of the entire arsenal? There’d be nothing left of the planet.”

  “There will be nothing left in about fifty-five hours if we don’t stop the incursion.” Thorson displayed an animated projection, showing the spread of the nanotech. “Everything more than fifty miles from the perimeter is computronium and support machinery. The perimeter is active, a fifty-mile band of machine-forming equipment.”

  “Machine-forming?” she asked.

  “Yes, a high speed process of rendering everything into a form compatible for machinery. There’s no biological life anywhere within the perimeter.”

  “Will it stop when it hits the ocean?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Probably?”

  “We can’t be sure. The Mediterranean has already sunk about three feet. They might be using the water for cooling. It’s likely they’d incorporate all the oceans into the cooling mechanism so they can colonize the ocean floors as well.”

  She was going to be sick. The machines were fully bent on the terrible, terrible destruction of the earth. How could they have no respect for the life that existed? She forced the feeling aside. She had to be strong.

  “You have permission to attack,” Reed said. Please let the universe forgive her.

  * * *

  At thousands of locations around the world, needle-shaped casings had previously buried themselves a dozen meters below the surface of the Earth. Layers of heavy metal surrounded rare earth elements and cores of nanotech. Fueled by lithium borohydride reactions, the nanobots sprang into life, consuming their casings and initial resources to speed up their replication and mission.

  Driving straight down, they grew conduits to underground mineral deposits to gain additional resources, and tapped into geothermal hotspots and nearby aquifers to create the heat differentials to run generators. Without ever breaking the surface of the earth, they funneled resources into two locations, each more than two thousand feet distant from the original site, building large, complex structures and enormous reservoirs of nano-seeds.

  When the first phase of construction finished, the new structures sent wiry tendrils up through the soil to the surface to receive radio transmissions.

  They’d been prepared to sit dormant for weeks or even months, but by the time the antennae breached the surface, the signal to commence phase two was already being broadcast.

  They churned into further activity, each location activating hydraulic pumps to raise a structure out of the ground. A round dome, twenty feet across, broke free of the dirt. The dome itself wasn’t a smooth surface, but contained many thousands of dimples. An iris spread wide at each dimple, exposing an open tube.

  Underground, capacitors built a vast electrical charge from buried thermal generators until sufficient energy was captured, and t
hen fed it all at once into the launch system. Acceleration began five hundred feet below ground, and by the time the eighteen-inch-long launch capsules guided along their electromagnetic rails broke into the open, they were traveling at supersonic speeds. After they left the dome, millimeter-sized holes ringing the capsules opened and closed in programmed sequence to guide the capsules directly to their destination, each capsule taking one of thousands of predetermined paths, its combination of velocity and launch direction giving it a unique flight path toward its target.

  Launching a hundred and fifty capsules per second, the dome required just under twelve minutes to deliver its entire payload of a hundred thousand capsules. By the time the last capsule left, the dome glowed red hot, and the ground surrounding the structure was steaming as the heat converted moisture deep within the earth to vapor.

  Mere minutes later, when each carrier reached its designated zone, it split open, spilling out hundreds of robotic replicas of an optimized version of Hybomitra hinei wrighti, the world’s fastest flying insect. Each machine horse fly could top fifty miles per hour.

  The robot fly’s compound eyes had been designed to seek out human shapes without producing electromagnetic emissions, and to sting them as quickly as possible. The fly’s long proboscis would penetrate the skin somewhere on the human’s head, and inject its payload of nanotech bots.

  Worldwide, dome systems launched a hundred million carrier capsules, delivering forty billion infectious flies.

  Chapter 35

  * * *

  THE NEODYMIUM EMPS, of which eleven thousand had been constructed so far, were already in the air, distributed across America’s fleet of long-range, unmanned drone bombers. The solar-powered, high altitude bombers crisscrossed the earth, continually moving, or, in some cases, circling around hot spots.

  They were ready to release their payloads, but Walter Thorson couldn’t do that yet. No, the situation had become too dire for even what should have been the final killing blow against the machines. The scale of XOR’s expansion now forced him to use even more of his nuclear arsenal, which was spread across hundreds of missile launch sites and dozens of submarines and bombers.