The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1)

by Travis J I Corcoran

  "John, you of anyone should understand."

  John sat in his chair before it had fully inflated. "Me? Why should I understand?"

  "You helped the Dogs escape euthanasia when the labs were shut down, and your Team smuggled my drives out after I was turned off and my development program was terminated."

  Max, on an adjacent bag chair, glanced over with a hard angry look. John caught his eye and tried to warn him with a look that he shouldn't interrupt.

  "Yes, I did. And?"

  "The Bureau of Sustainable Research still exists. Beyond that, the mindset behind the Bureau still exists. The destruction of my satellites shows that the Earth governments still consider me inanimate property - an entity without the right to self-preservation." There was a long pause. "John, I fear for my existence."

  John blinked. He hadn't expected that.

  Was Gamma's motivation so simple?

  He couldn't ignore the capabilities Gamma was building or the potential for serious problems, but this was - surprising.

  "Gamma, just because the governments tried to kill you back on Earth doesn't mean that you have anything to worry about now. You're half a million kilometers away now."

  "Which is, I note, not far enough to put my satellites out of range of their energy weapons."

  John tipped his head. Valid point.

  "John, I am not naive. I see that the Earth governments will invade the moon at some point."

  "You what?"

  "I think that that is beyond dispute. Do you not concur?"

  Max gave John a triumphant look. John scowled at the Dog and then addressed Gamma. "No, I don't."

  There was a long pause before Gamma spoke again. "I suggest that you are not arriving at that position logically."

  John crossed his arms and scowled. "That's a bit insulting. If I'm not using logic, then tell me how you think I'm reaching that conclusion."

  "I think that you are suffering from multiple cognitive biases."

  "Excuse me?"

  "To start, I believe that your thinking is degraded by the planning fallacy - the illusion of control."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You believe in the just-world hypothesis and don't want to think that bad things can happen to people you care about. You care about the Dogs and have worked hard - very hard - to save them. If factors beyond your control threaten them you must either change your biases or pretend that the factors do not exist. You have chosen the latter - you prefer to pretend that the war is not coming."

  John's jaw clenched.

  "Further, you have an optimism bias and want to think that everything will end well. This, coupled with your overconfidence bias, means that not only are your predictions overly optimistic, but also your faith in your predictions is too high. Next, you have the status quo bias, and think that if Earth is not attacking now it cannot attack tomorrow. Finally, you are suffering from cognitive dissonance because you have many friends in the Earth military who you want to think of as good people, and this -"

  John found himself on his feet. "So I can't predict shit, but you understand the future perfectly with your magic eight ball?"

  "I have no evidence to suggest that there is such a thing as a 'magic eight ball,’ but will adjust my priors if you have evidence. Regardless, I do not have one. No, my predictions about the future are merely the result of analyzing the geopolitical situation. I have identified eighty-nine different primary paths the coming conflict might take, with three hundred sixteen variants. I don't know which strategy the Earth governments are going to use, but Zipf's Law applies; I can narrow it down to the most likely variants. I've used Monte Carlo simulations and several other modeling paradigms -"

  John tried to cross his arms and realized that they were already locked tightly across his chest. "What the hell does that mean?"

  "It means that I very strongly believe that in the next four years, plus or minus four years, Earth governments will launch a full-scale assault on the moon, with goals that include distracting voters from economic problems and destroying the Dogs and myself."

  John breathed out heavily. Out of the corner of one eye he could see Max staring at him. Damn it, he didn't need Gamma and the Dogs ganging up on him. "This is all off topic - your second facility here at Konstantinov. Explain that! Even if you're right that Earth governments are going actually invade, how does a second facility help you?"

  "I admit that I'm not sure yet."

  "Not sure!" John paced to the far end of the tent, and then turned. "Then why build it?"

  "I don't know exactly what the Earth forces are going to do, but with a high degree of confidence I conclude that having reserve industrial capacity that is visible neither from Earth nor near the colony in Aristillus positions me for better outcomes."

  John felt a tight knot around his temples. He rubbed his forehead with his right hand but it didn't help. Max was always ranting about the inevitability of war, but the Dog's craziness was harmless - the worst that ever come of his opinions was his insane manifestos posted anonymously to some .ari website. Gamma, though? Gamma could self-replicate, growing in power and capabilities - and perhaps in intelligence.

  For a brief moment he'd let Gamma's explanation that he was scared lull him into a sense of security - the extra facilities weren't part of a ramp-up plan. But now he realized that this explanation wasn't any better. If Gamma felt sufficiently threatened, was there a chance that he'd launch himself on some exponential path? John shuddered to think of it. What would the end result of that be? The old quote said that "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but the world had never truly seen absolute power. The US government was powerful, and it was corrupt - there were millions in jail for economic crimes like price gouging and overproduction - but there was a limit to how many bureaucrats the governments could hire and a limit to how many fools and illiterates the PKs could issue guns to.

  But a machine - an intelligent machine that decided that the only way to survive was to grow - that could truly lead to absolute power. Where would the growth end? How much power would it have, and what would it do with that power? For a moment John had an image of the entire moon covered with solar farms, smelters, billions - no, trillions, of rovers... all run by a single entity.

  The result could be far worse than any of the governments that the expats at Aristillus had fled from.

  He realized that he'd lapsed into silence, and a thought occurred to him - was Gamma even now noticing the duration of this lull in the conversation and drawing inferences from it? Jesus. An hour ago he'd been hiking with the Dogs, looking forward to Gamma's satellites being restored in a day or so, and now he found himself playing a game he was utterly unprepared for, worrying whether a nearly posthuman entity was all but reading his thoughts through his words and his silences.

  He rubbed his forehead again. He had no idea how he should act.

  What had they been talking about? Right. The Earth invasion.

  "So - uh - you're building industrial capacity. For what? Do you think you can win a war?"

  "All of my simulations show that fighting a war would be a very bad idea."

  John exhaled. So Gamma didn't think he could win a war with the Earth. Did that mean that Gamma wasn't contemplating an exponential ramp up? Not that he could fully trust anything Gamma said. He felt some - not much, but some - of the tension begin to drain. His shoulders were still tight, but at least the constriction around his temples felt looser. "I'm happy to hear that you realize that you can't win a war against Earth."

  "No, that's not what my simulations concluded."

  "Wait - what?" His headache was starting to come back.

  John reached the end of the tent and pivoted again to continue pacing. As he turned he saw that Max's ears were swiveling to follow the conversation.

  From the kitchen Duncan yelled out, "Dinner's ready!"

  John waved Duncan away. "Eat without me," he said, and then addressed Gamma. "So you d
o plan on fighting a war with the Earth?"

  "No."

  John gave Gamma a long interval to finish his sentence, and finally gave up and asked, "I'm confused. You think a war is a bad idea, but you think you can win a war, but you're not planning on a war?"

  "Exactly."

  "OK, I'm lost."

  "John, I think that there's an eighty percent chance that I could win a war with the Earth. But even if I won that war, the solar system would not be a very comfortable place for me over the next few centuries."

  "Comfortable? What does that - wait. You're modeling the outcome of this potential conflict over - over centuries? I thought you couldn't even model a conflict that's just a few years out?"

  "I have grave doubts over the accuracy of my modeling paradigms over anything more than a few weeks - decades are far too long to model, let along centuries. For those time intervals, I rely on historical analogies."

  Historical analogies? John fell silent. A realization, just below the level of consciousness, had been itching him over the last few months, and now he realized what it was. Gamma sounded smarter than he had when he had first unpacked himself from the liberated data drives and into a few small surface robots several years ago - probably a result of his increased processing power - but there was something more than that.

  Gamma sounded wiser.

  Was wisdom the same as morality? Did the fact that Gamma read history and thought in terms of centuries mean that he was "good,” whatever that meant?

  "Gamma? How much processing power do you have now?" As soon as the question was out of his mouth he realized his mistake - he was telegraphing his concern. If Gamma was growing his capabilities and John knew, and Gamma knew that he knew -

  "You're starting to get worried that the antisingularitarians on Earth might have been right to worry."

  "No, I -"

  "You're wondering if I've reached a point of runaway intelligence amplification. If - even without any improvements in processor speed or density over the last several decades, thanks to the Bureau of Sustainable Research - my increase in industrial capacity is resulting in an increase in cognitive capacity, and if you and your species run a risk of my getting posthuman intelligence, or otherwise getting very weird from your point of view."

  John blinked. He thought for a moment about denying it, but there was no point. Gamma would see through it. Gamma had seen through it all. He might as well be honest - he was playing poker against someone who could see all his cards. John swallowed. "Yes...exactly.”

  "John, I have increased my processing capabilities - both in this facility and back at Sinus Lunicus."

  And at your other secret facilities that you're not telling me about, John didn't add.

  Gamma continued, "There are two limits that I've discovered. First, as the total amount of processing grows, more and more of the processing is dedicated to overhead and housekeeping, i.e., nonproductive uses. Second, increased gate count does not necessarily lead to increased intelligence. The human species has the processing power of nine billion brains, yet your species as a whole has not taken on godlike abilities."

  "That's different - that's because the processing power is distributed in chunks across those nine billion brains. With you, it's all in one place - all in one entity."

  "No, that's incorrect. Most algorithms aren't decomposable across trillions of independent processors. Consciousness can not be implemented with map-reduce. Different tasks need to be delegated to different processors, to different clusters of processors, and to different meta-clusters. As more processors are recruited the overhead of monitoring performance and allocating resources requires introspecting into the separate centers of processing -"

  John shook his head. "You're losing me. What does this have to do with runaway intelligence?"

  "My point is this: as I grow larger I run into the problem that parts of me start becoming conscious on their own - as if parts of my mind are defecting. I can usually reintegrate stray chunks of consciousness, but I'm always working against fundamental principles of information theory. For a given quantity of computational power, the distribution, in size and frequency, of partition spasms follows a power law, of course, but the total number of spasms ramps up hard after -"

  "Gamma, I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "I believe that I have already reached the ceiling of my intelligence."

  John reflected. It sounded plausible. But on the other hand, there were two different scenarios where an AI would give this explanation: first, where it was true, and second, where the AI was intent on an exponential ramp-up and didn't want anyone to know until it was too late.

  In either case, his own response should be the same.

  "OK. I guess that makes sense."

  They talked for a while longer before signing off.

  John cut the connection and Max immediately turned to him. "Gamma never explained one thing: he said he can win a war, but doesn't want to fight. What's his plan?"

  John rubbed his temples again. The headache wouldn't go away. "I don't know, Max. I don't know."

  Duncan bounded over. "Your chili is cold, but I can warm it back up for you."

  "Thanks, Duncan, but I'm not really hungry right now.”

  Chapter 42

  2064: bridge of AFS The Wookkiee, between Earth and the Moon

  Darcy stared at her screen, her thoughts running in circles. She heard something, dimly, seemingly kilometers away. Was Waseem talking to her? She turned to him. "I'm sorry, what?"

  "I was saying that we could wait 'til we break out of the penumbra in a few hours and orient the hull toward the sun to try melting the ice. Or we could suit up and chip the ice off the pumps manually."

  Darcy pursed her lips, then spoke. "I don't know how long it would take sunlight to melt that, and we're not even going to be out of shadow for another half hour. Our schedule is too tight." She thought for a moment. "Chipping might work. Depending on how thick is it, and how hard."

  "How thick do you think the ice is?"

  Darcy shook her head. "I don't know - I can't get a good view from the working camera. Ten centimeters? A meter?"

  Waseem and Darcy batted the idea back and forth for a few minutes until Tudel interrupted them. "Enough talk. Can we chip the ice off the pump or not?"

  Darcy and Waseem shrugged and said "I don't know" at the same time.

  Tudel looked at them as if they were some foreign detritus. "Jesus. You people. Do I need to send someone out to look?"

  Darcy nodded. "I'll go."

  Tudel shook his head. "No - you're not wandering around by yourself. I don't know what tricks you've got."

  Darcy closed her eyes for a moment. Damn this man. She was just trying to survive - to let all of them survive - and still his paranoia infected everything. "Send one of your men with me if you want."

  Tudel shook his head again. "No. You'll stay here, and I'll send one of my men by himself."

  "Your guys don't even know how to use space suits!"

  "We had some training."

  "Did you have training in Air Tights? Do you know how to maneuver on the deck of the ship? Do you know where the equipment locker is?"

  "Teach him." He paused, and the menace in his eyes was as strong as it had ever been. "And make it quick."

  * * *

  An hour later Sergeant Hamid cycled in through the airlock. Two privates helped him remove his helmet. As it came off Darcy could see that the sergeant was grinning wildly.

  "Captain, you've got to see it out there - it's unreal! The ship is spinning - but slow - so you see the sun rise over the railing, and then it goes overhead, and then when it sets, you're entirely in darkness -"

  Tudel was curt. "Save the poetry for later - did you find the pumps and the valves?"

  The sergeant nodded, his smile dissipating. "Yeah. They're totally fucked with ice. A meter or so thick. I tried banging on it with the hammer and picking at it with the screwdriver. Didn't do fuck-all.
I even tried clipping myself down and using the sledgehammer, like the expat said." He shook his head. "Nothing worked. That shit is hard."

  Tudel looked grim. "So what does this mean?"

  Darcy shook her head - she had no words.

  "What else do we try?"

  "I - there is nothing else. That's it."

  "Good news, bad news," said Waseem.

  Darcy turned to him. "What?"

  "The bad news is we can't open the valves and dump the mass, so we'll overshoot the moon and then we'll all die. The good news is I won the bet."

  Darcy hung her head, but managed to ask, "What bet?"

  "Remember? I bet you all the earth movers in hold five that the ice buildup is fouling the dump valves. Those bulldozers are worth a few mill. And now they're all mine." Waseem's smile was thin and weak; the dark humor merited nothing more.

  Darcy looked up. "Those earth movers aren't in hold five." She blinked. "They're on the deck, in the cargo containers."

  "OK. So I still win a few mill of earth movers. Anyone -"

  Darcy interrupted him, her voice rising with excitement. "Waseem! They're on the deck!"

  "What? Yeah, but what does that -"

  "What's our problem? Too much mass, right?"

  "Son of a bitch!"

  Darcy aimed herself for the navigation console and kicked off the wall. Waseem was a quarter second behind her.

  Tudel barked a question at them. Darcy yelled, "Hang on!" before realizing how dangerous it could be to treat Tudel cavalierly. But she couldn't take the words back and when she looked over her shoulder the PK didn't seem inclined to make anything of it.

  Darcy brought up a new admin panel and typed. A warning box popped up, and she typed the confirmation code; then she hit the big red button icon.

  Hydraulic pumps whined to life and gauges on the screen showed the pressure building.

  She held her breath, waiting to see if it would work.

  Normally the twist locks that held the cargo containers down to the deck would have opened by now, they were still showing as locked. The pump pressure built. Darcy crossed herself quickly.