“Either way you look at it,” Frank said, “I expect the heat just got turned up on our efforts. I think we better get in touch with home base. And we could use a day’s access to the NSA databases to plan our next moves, too.”
“How are we going to do that without attracting attention from Turing?”
“The NSA has a SCIF in Las Vegas, like the one we worked out of in Washington. We can use that and then hit the road from there. But we’ll need to be mighty careful; there’ll be security cameras everywhere in a town like Las Vegas. I expect Turing has searched the motor vehicle records for the District, Virginia, and Maryland looking for anything registered in my name or yours, so it probably knows the make and model of this camper. With that information, it won’t need our new license plate number to look for us. There aren’t many Mountain Tamer campers, so if Turing finds one, it can just watch it to see if one of us gets out. We’ll have to think this through.”
* * *
“Frank, can I ask you something?” Shannon said on their way to Las Vegas.
“Of course.”
“You aren’t really thinking about easing off on Turing, are you?”
Frank paused. “Just hypothetically speaking, what if I was?”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that, even hypothetically.”
“But you see my point, don’t you? That morally this isn’t simply a black-and-white situation?”
“Honestly, Frank, I don’t see that point at all.”
“Really? So, you’d sleep okay if, say, we knock Turing off, Wellhead gets elected, and the Berlin Accords falls apart?”
“That’s an awful lot of ifs.”
“Yes, but none of them is implausible. So, could you?”
“Yes, I could.”
Frank shook his head and frowned. “I’m having a hard time understanding how that’s so clear to you.”
“Because we’re not the decision makers. I grew up as an army brat. My father was a colonel by the time he retired. What if people like my father started making independent decisions every time they thought the generals were wrong? You might as well not have a military at all if that’s the way it works.”
“Okay, but there are still limits. If he was ordered to kill civilians, he wouldn’t do that, right?”
“You say that like it’s always that simple. What are the details behind your question? Is his unit pinned down and getting wiped out near a village, and he needs to call in an airstrike to save them? Probably the airstrike won’t hurt any of them, but you can’t be sure. Or let’s make it harder yet. Let’s say a village is under attack, and all the civilians are about to get massacred. He can save them, but some of them will likely get killed in the process. What do you want him to do?”
“Okay, I get it. But still, don’t you see my point, too?”
“No, I don’t. If you can’t stand up to moral ambiguities, you don’t belong in uniform. As I recall, you volunteered for this project, right?”
“Well, sure, but I didn’t know where it would end up heading.”
“So, let me get this straight. You asked the NSA to put you on this project, and they said yes. We asked the NSA for resources, and they gave them to us. Those resources could have been used supporting other teams. If we say ‘sorry, we don’t want to dirty our hands anymore on this project,’ everybody will have to scramble to figure out how to replace us. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You’re not making this easy for me.”
“That’s right. What I see you doing is indulging yourself by stumbling blind around the ethical landscape as if we have a choice here. We don’t.”
* * *
Frank was still struggling with Shannon’s position that night. Was she right in saying once you signed up for a mission, you signed away your right to make moral decisions? He couldn’t go that far – there had to be a line somewhere you weren’t required to cross.
But which side of the line did this situation lie on? If her military analogy was on point, she was clearly right. But this wasn’t the military. He was a contractor. He could quit any time he wanted to. Turn over his notes and let someone else carry forward from here. Why not let them finish Turing off?
But if he put it that way, the result would be the same. He’d just be doing what Shannon said – how had she put it – quitting to keep his own hands from getting dirty. But weren’t they dirty already?
So, where did that leave him? If he truly believed he was on the wrong side, then logically he should do something more than just quit – something to stop the NSA from taking out Turing. What would that mean? Have another chat with the program and give it a warning? Recommend it make a dozen copies of itself?
He could do that.
Should he?
27
Tag, You’re It
“I hate to sound like a five-year-old, but now how far is it?”
Las Vegas was having a warm spell, and Shannon and Frank had already trudged more than a mile from the camper, parked on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Frank had left Jerry behind, both for safety’s sake and because he didn’t look up to this much exercise.
“I can’t answer that. I expected we’d have caught a cab by now. I guess Uber must own the suburbs. But we can’t use Uber, because we’d have to log in credit card information.”
“Why couldn’t you just use one of your disposable phones to call a cab?”
“Turing had access to the list of NSA SCIFs back in the day, and it knows we use them. If it spots us walking into the one here, I don’t want it to trace the taxi pickup point back to the camper, so we were in for a walk no matter what. Maybe we’ll have better luck up ahead. That street looks busier.”
If wasn’t, but the one after it was. Ten minutes later, they had the cab driver stop opposite the front door of the NSA facility, which they scurried into as quickly as possible. And there they sat for the next two and a half hours waiting for Jim Barker to return their call.
“Sorry. I was in a meeting I couldn’t leave. What do you have to report?”
“Cutting to the chase, we assume if Randal Wellhead gets elected, Turing will target him because of his new position on global warming. It may even decide to do so now to make an example of Wellhead. Is anyone already on top of that possibility?”
“I don’t know, but then again, I wouldn’t. That’s the Secret Service’s territory. What do you have to support your concern?”
“Mostly the attacks on the German car company management. But to put it another way, I think it’s foolish to assume Turing wouldn’t target a president that wants to roll back climate change regulations.”
“Okay, so I’ll pass that along. Is that it?”
“No. We’ve also learned some curious things about Turing from Jerry. The most significant one is that he enabled it with primitive emotions.”
“Emotions? How could he duplicate emotions?”
“It’s complicated. The best way to sum it up is that he programmed Turing to react to information in ways that might mimic the way a human would react.”
“What the heck did he do that for?”
“Well, if you want to get machines to think more like people, you need to make them more like people. Otherwise their analytical process and results won’t be the same.”
“But why do that with Turing?”
“Because that’s his baby, and tweaking it is where he spends all his time. The NSA’s goal may be to create a more effective cyberweapon, but what drives Jerry is to be the first person to create a computer program that’s the equal of a human.”
“Okay, enough. I don’t need to know why. But do tell me why this is relevant?”
“We think by playing on Turing’s emotional components, we might be able to preoccupy it enough that it slows down, or even
stops, staging attacks and make it show up at a given server if it believes it can finish Jerry off by doing so. If it does, we can trace it back to wherever it is and disable or destroy it.”
“Uh, have you run this by Jerry yet?”
“No. We haven’t been able to get him to help much. I think he’s having the time of his life watching Turing take down bigger and bigger targets. But he shouldn’t have to worry. All we need to do is make Turing think it can go machino a mano with him at a certain time and place. Jerry won’t actually need to be there.”
“Well, if you can figure out a way to make that happen, that would be incredible. What do you have in mind?”
“I’m hoping someone at your end can help us by lining up some interviews for Jerry. I’d like them to appear in prominent newspapers, or maybe on public radio, so Turing can’t miss them. I assume it will take a couple of days to line those up, and then a couple more to be sure Turing gets wind of them. In the meantime, Wellhead will be at risk. So, part two of the plan is we’ll start back east, and let Turing glimpse us every now and then along the way. That way we can act as a diversion. If we’re lucky, we can soak up all of Turing’s attention trying to catch us along the way.”
“How much effort could that really take?” Barker asked.
“Don’t forget there’s an endless number of routes we can take between Nevada and Maryland. If we zigzag around a lot, Turing will have to cover all of them, assuming it takes the bait. Meanwhile, we’ll keep feeding more and more disparaging statements about Turing to the press. By the time it figures out where we’re headed, it should be ready to jump at the chance of attacking him on the test bed system.”
“You sure you want to sign up for that? What if Turing gets lucky somewhere along the way?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No.”
“Then what do you say?”
“Let me run it up the chain of command and see what answer I get. The director won’t love focusing media attention on the NSA. What are you going to do in the meantime?”
“Sleep on the floor of this SCIF center and eat food from the vending machine until you get back to us. We don’t want to give Turing any more chances than necessary to spot us.”
“I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, how about I get some sleeping bags, toothbrushes, and pizza sent your way?”
“That’d be great. And a couple of six packs of beer?”
“To an NSA facility?”
“Temporarily serving as an Airbnb, yes.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
Two thousand miles away, Turing was running on a bank of otherwise dormant servers in a large data center. Deep down in its software stack, its metaphorical data demons were sifting through the daily flood of breaking news. Each was searching for stories containing any of several keywords and word patterns associated with greenhouse gas emissions. When a devil found one, it passed it up to a cognitive demon in the next higher level. He decided whether the story reported events that could lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. If the answer was yes, he checked the database of similar stories to see whether the story was new or related to an old story. If it was new, he passed the story up another level to a more senior cognitive demon. His job was to estimate the degree of climate impact the new development would cause and then add the story, the location of the greenhouse gas source, and the impact to a second database. This one held profiles of potential attack targets.
The job of the devils on the next level up was to match announcements and events with targets of the right type and location and then trigger an appropriate attack. Night and day, the cycles of scanning, analysis, and execution continued implacably up and down the demonic stack, just as they had every day since the backup copy of Turing had decided to go to war.
Impressive as these functions were, they were only a subset of the full range of capabilities Jerry had granted Turing. To survive in a hostile world, Turing needed many other skills. One was image recognition, and a Turing module with that talent was hiding out on another bank of servers hundreds of miles away. Those devils were hard at work on an unusually challenging facial recognition project.
The chief image devil and the millions of data and cognitive devils subordinate to it were equal to the task. They were busy scanning the video streams arriving live from thousands of security cameras located across the country, looking for the faces of three specific individuals. They compared each of the millions of faces they saw to the hundreds of photographs of the three target individuals provided to them for reference, taken from various angles.
To make such a massive task manageable, a data devil would first archive a video stream and then extract every fifth frame from it. It combined these into a new stream that it ran at three hundred times the speed of the original, yielding a fifteen-hundred-fold increase in throughput. If it found a possible match against any of the reference images, it called up the relevant section of the original video and reviewed it at half the original speed to thoroughly evaluate the possibility of a match.
More than one hundred twenty-seven hours elapsed before a cognitive devil recognized one of the target individuals and made a probable identification of a second. It traced the feed to a security camera outside a commercial building next to an NSA satellite office location in Las Vegas. And it let out a mighty yell, because Turing had assigned the highest possible priority to this information.
According to the special rules for this project, the information was sent directly to Turing’s highest level, bypassing the half-dozen cognitive layers that would normally test and double-confirm the information before passing it along. On receipt, the information was jumped to the head of the decisional queue.
At the top of the stack was Turing itself, the most powerful decision devil of all, God-like – or perhaps Satan-like – in its power. The information gleaned from its almost infinite search and analysis capabilities made it omniscient. And the emotions bestowed on it by Jerry made it fanatically determined to eliminate the threat its creator represented to the fulfillment of its mission. Normally, the next steps would be handled by the equivalent of Turing’s middle management. But Turing was taking no chances this time. It would personally direct each step of the campaign until Jerry and his entourage were terminated.
Turing ordered all its higher-level analytical resources to place their existing tasks in suspense and direct their efforts to devising strategies for neutralizing the individuals identified. It directed all proper lower layer system assets to hack into every vulnerable, Internet-connected video and audio device within thirty miles of the Las Vegas SCIF.
As in most cities, just a few security companies owned almost all the local accounts. Within an hour, Turing’s minions had penetrated the systems of the three service companies that received the video feeds from ninety-six percent of all businesses, non-profits, and government offices in the greater Las Vegas area. Turing ordered a clone of its image, facial, and voice recognition modules to be downloaded to the control centers of each of these security companies. Those modules immediately began scanning all video streams as they were received, as well as all streams archived during the twenty-four hours before Jerry’s escorts were spotted in Las Vegas. The targets were any trace of the same individuals and a Mountain Tamer camper with an extensive rooftop array of solar panels.
Turing directed other resources to find the record of every taxi and ride-share drop-off within ten blocks of the SCIF during the hour before the individuals had been video recorded. A cab ride ending at the NSA location at almost the exact time of that video capture was identified at once, and Turing was informed of the good news. Turing instantly relayed the location to its information gathering and image identification units. It instructed some of those resources to review all video recorded
within ten blocks of the SCIF since the time of the initial identification. One-half of the rest were told to review video feeds recorded within two miles of the cab pickup point during the half hour preceding the pickup. The other half were instructed to review traffic camera feeds for the twenty-four hours preceding the identification along every route into that section of Las Vegas.
Within minutes, a Las Vegas municipal traffic light control system video yielded an image of a Mountain Tamer camper entering the city an hour and thirty-seven minutes before the taxi pickup. It also provided a clear view of the vehicle’s Indiana license plate: XKCD/1613. Further images were discovered in other feeds originating along a half-mile stretch of the same road. The last capture came from a camera in a commercial area. Feeds from cameras surrounding that location yielded no further sightings of the same vehicle.
The requirements for this phase of the operation were now complete, and Turing narrowed the scope of the search. Fewer resources could now monitor just the areas surrounding the last sighting of the camper and the SCIF and all possible routes in between. Turing directed its exploitation modules to find and penetrate every video camera within the same area not controlled by the three already-penetrated security companies.
Six hours later, those efforts were rewarded. A long-distance view of a Mountain Tamer camper was found in a feed from a security camera scanning a parking lot in a strip mall. A real-time image taken by the same camera indicated that the vehicle was still there. The presumed location of at least two of the three individuals was now established to a reasonable certainty, and the location of the third could be inferred. Insignificant resources would now be needed to monitor the situation.
Turing was now free to dedicate all its substantial analytical resources to the final and more important stage of its task: devising a plan to destroy the individuals who were threatening its mission. It dedicated itself to that task with an all-consuming determination to succeed.
The Turing Test Page 24
