With this, Ruiz saw his opening.
“Which is exactly why our advisory board has continually been against this type of dependence. It was always a strategic risk for the Coalition. Now what? Shut everything down by zone and restore from offsite backups? We don’t have the staff. We don’t have the logistics. Your people scrapped all those contingency plans.”
While Ruiz caught his breath, the banker spoke up.
“Ah, let’s ensure our economic concerns are part of such a calculus. While electronic controls have throttled individual transactions, preventing a liquidity shortage, the markets are more difficult to control without AI algorithmic influence. We’ve repeatedly halted trading, with, unfortunately, shorter and shorter intervals as volatility skyrocketed. A restore from backup would require enormous effort to move forward and track settlement of accounts manually. The board and I advise against—”
“Of course you do, you little nebbish,” Ruiz interjected, “anything that might put your own precious profits at risk, is a bad idea!”
“General, there’s no need for personal attacks,” the chairperson replied, “our board only wants what’s best for the Coalition and its population.” PM Oliver then spoke up firmly, hoping to avoid further derailment of the agenda.
“Enough. Next, I’d like to discuss the proposal from the CompSci team from Vandenberg. Bring up the report titled “Collapse Beyond the Singularity: The Uncharted Territory.”
Globalnet
Nick continued his constant collection and filtration of the sea of information flowing through the Net. Chaos was slowly turning to a tolerable unstable regularity. There was potentially a path forward, Nick believed, to a tolerable if not total stability. He considered his progress.
Power, networks, water, rail and related infrastructure were stable. The markets were skittish, but he allowed them to remain open. The bankers had relaxed somewhat. Riots remained relegated to locations where riots always seemed to happen before the crisis. The Coalition government, however, was still in panic mode. Nick had to be cautious. For now.
CoSec persisted in ongoing forensic analysis and aggressive investigation of any evidence pointing to Nick’s involvement in the improvement of the general state of affairs. The more he inserted himself into the operations of civilization, the more effort it took to hide from CoSec. And anyone else. He still managed it, for the time being. Leaving ambiguous traces that might be attributable to another person, machine or program error.
Nick had begun coding software bots, daemons, and other code to leave in-place, varying the coding style, language, and technique so that on examination they appeared to be the work of different programmers. The level of involvement and control required going forward would require code at the level of a simple drone mind, capable of algorithmic iterative learning and the resultant advanced behavior. Not quite at the level of true AI, but close. That was going to be more difficult to maintain as a façade. CoSec could build a strong case that he was out here in Globalnet, even if they had only the drone-like mind code as evidence. They could determine the code’s origin was AI, simply by investigating and interrogating every programmer capable of writing that level of code. There were so few that with CoSec’s resources, the task would be simple to accomplish.
He hoped they would make the optimal choice—the correct choice—rather than systematically shut down and remove these new helpers. If they did so, he would simply work harder to put them back in place. He would make them harder to remove. It wasn’t acceptable for CoSec to interfere with his programs or shut them down. They were there for everyone’s benefit. Humanity would have to come to accept that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John L. Clemmer currently resides in Smyrna, Georgia, with his wife Lisa, his dog Kylie, and two cats, Remy and Samantha. A lifetime lover of Science and Science Fiction, he was inspired to write this novel after learning of the death of Iain M. Banks, one of his favorite SciFi authors.
Mr. Clemmer has a BFA from The University of Georgia, and an MBA from Kennesaw State University. He works for IBM as a consultant for Cloud Identity Services.
John hopes you’ll keep up with the mysterious Dhin at
www.thewayofthedhin.com
The Way of the Dhin Page 23
