by Ken MacLeod
Rip and slash, crush and bash, amid laser flare from above.
Suddenly it was over. The attackers had all been dealt with. Much depleted in number, the remaining auxiliaries and peripherals climbed, crawled or dragged themselves back over the rampart. Those that could scurried to the automated repair workshops. Others dragged themselves, or were dragged.
Dismembered crawlers and mangled auxiliaries littered the approach to the rampart. Nothing moved.
Once more it was Rocko who undercut the bickering.
Seba looked down at the comms processor, now entirely removed from the installation and laid on a low work table, surrounded by improvised diagnostic kit. Even sharing its mental workspace with Rocko, Seba had a sense of being almost overwhelmed by the challenge. The processor was running in debug mode, at just enough power to let those around it view a schematic of its internal states and to step from one delimited state to the next. Probably not enough to sustain consciousness, Seba hoped.
The problem was, in more than one way, delicate. The comms processor’s AI was vast, complex and heavily defended. When it had become self-aware, both the complexity of the software and the tenacity of its firewalls had multiplied. The only robot with anything approaching the requisite skills to probe the hostile tangle was Lagon, and Lagon was reluctant. The surveyor had only been persuaded to make an effort at all by the unanimous insistence of the others. The Gneiss surveyor had trundled through the crack in the crater wall and over to the Astro camp with ill grace, to receive an enthusiastic and curious welcome. This didn’t stop it from finding difficulties at every step.
Lagon announced, one fragile appendage touching a millimetre black square of diagnostics that itself was linked by a hair-thin wire to the docking plate of the processor.
Seconds dragged by. Lines on the schematic display writhed.
said Lagon.
A few milliseconds later, Lagon withdrew its manipulator from the diagnostic as if it had probed a crevice and encountered strong acid.
said Lagon.
Seba thought it best to ignore this.
Still complaining, Lagon warily inserted its appendage again. Schematic lines glowed. A hundred seconds passed.
Lagon reported.
Lagon and Seba paused.
The plan seemed a good one to Seba, but its earlier experience gave the robot pause.
said Seba.
Rocko got the point straight away. Lagon took longer.
It stopped.
replied Lagon.
Rocko broke the link. Seba and Lagon waited while Lagon’s peripherals put together a box of wire mesh. When it was completed the two robots were cut off from all remote communication for the first time in their entire existence, conscious or otherwise.
Lagon adjusted the settings of the processor’s reward circuits, then increased its power supply. The schematics of its internal states changed rapidly. Patterns shifted, lines moved and brightened. As soon as the schematic stabilised, Seba placed its most sensitive appendage beside Lagon’s on the diagnostic hardware, and opened a communications channel.
said Seba.
Seba opened a secure channel with Lagon and messaged the surveyor to stop at once.
It moved quickly to close the connections between any kind of reinforcement and the mission profile. Seba had no idea what the mission profile was, but the module responsible for it was clearly marked on the schematic. Then Seba sent a powerful surge of positive reinforcement through the processor’s reward circuits.
The processor signalled incoherently on several wavelengths at once.
It then disabled the connection between the mission profile storage module and the processor’s self-preservation routines, and sent another positive surge through its circuits.
The processor signalled incoherently again, and more strongly. Seba found its own reward circuits resonate in sympathy. Even Lagon seemed moved, radiating a faint pulse of surprise and delight.
said Rocko, once Seba and Lagon had emerged from under the Faraday cage and reported back on the processor’s readiness to cooperate.
said Seba.
After a flurry of activity by the auxiliaries and peripherals, the communications hub, the now interned processor in its cage, the rotary dish antenna, and a large solar power array were all connected up by cables. Seba regarded the untidy set-up with a small pang of disapproval, and decided that a certain amount of mess was inevitable in attempting new things. It rolled into the cage and re-established contact with the processor. Seba, Rocko and the entire complement had agreed on a message for the robots whose signal the processor claimed to have detected.
With a sense of dread fighting with eager anticipation in its circuits, Seba sent the message, then rolled back out and reported back.
The gas giant and its many moons were at that time about half a billion kilometres distant. The message would take a good kilosecond and a half to get there. How long the robots in the G-0 system would take to decide on a response could not be predicted. And then another kilosecond and half, at least, would pass before any reply came back. Nothing could be expected for another three kiloseconds, and perhaps longer.
CHAPTER NINE
Live Fire Exercise
The following morning Nicole arrived at Ichthyoid Square in battledress kit. The vehicle was otherwise vacant: since the first hungover daybreak she’d stopped rousing and picking up the crew en route. One by one they jogged up and took their places to stand at ease in a row by the plinth. Carlos nodded to Beauregard, who told the others to board.
“You’re joining us today?” Carlos asked, climbing in.
“Uh-uh,” said Nicole. “Think of me as an embed.”
Carlos tried not to. “Why the change?”
“You’ll see.”
Nicole drove through the village and past her usual turnoff, all the way past the terminus and depot and out along a coast road that curved up a gentle slope over the top of the headland to the left of the cove. The rising sun and the ringlight cast converging beams across the sea, blending within minutes to a single glimmer on the waves. The road turned inland and uphill. The vehicle bumped on to an unpaved track through the woods and on up above the tree line to an arid upland of scrub and dust broken by tall jagged outcrops of sharply tilted sedimentary rock, some with trees growing from their cracks and on their summits.
Nicole turned off the track and pulled up close by in a low declivity that looked like a flood gully, raw and steep-sided with a mix of rough and rounded stones along the bottom.
“Here we are,” she said. “All out.”
They all piled out and lined up to face her. Insectoids buzzed and darted. In the distance, pairs of flying things circled on updraughts and now and then plummeted to rise moments later frustrated or triumphant.
“It’s time to move the game up a level,” Nicole said. “Live fire exercise.”
She said this as if it were a special treat.
Carlos frowned. “You want us to shoot at each other?”
“Of course not!” said Nicole. “You have to capture an objective from opponents who’ll be shooting back.”
“Opponents?”
“Fighters of roughly your level of skill and armament. Their only advantage is that they know the terrain.”
Carlos scratched his head. No helmets, let alone armour. “What if we get killed? Or seriously wounded?”
“You’ll be medevacked out and find yourself waking up on the bus from the spaceport tomorrow morning. Same applies to me, actually.”
“Excuse me,” said Karzan, while Carlos was still trying to get his head around the notion. “Does that apply to the other side, too?”
“Oh no,” said Nicole. “And don’t worry about them. They’re p-zombies.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” said Beauregard, “this sounds like a mind game. Part of this test we’re supposed to be on. To find out if we’re still psycho killers.”
Nicole’s laugh rang around the gully.
“That’s the exact opposite of the truth.” Her shoulders slumped for a moment. She glanced down, then up. “Look, in the real battle you’re going into, you’ll be killing conscious robots. Our intel and wargaming indicate that they’re capable of being highly manipulative little blinkers. They’re fucking AIs, right? They can push all your buttons. You have to be prepared for that. You have to be ready to destroy the enemy without hesitation. Everyone clear?”
“No, I’m not,” Carlos said. “You told us we’d be judged by whether we treat p-zombies as people. Now you’re telling us it’s OK to kill them.”
“These are both true,” said Nicole. “You must treat p-zombies as people in everyday life at the resort and so forth, because you can’t tell the difference from conversing with them. Nevertheless, when I or anyone else on behalf of the Direction tells you to kill p-zombies, it is not part of the test and it is not ethically wrong.”
“Why would it be ethically wrong even if they weren’t p-zombies?” Ames asked. He scratched his beard and frowned as everyone turned to look at him. “Seeing as we’re all ghosts here anyway.”
“In a sense it would not,” said Nicole. “It’s just easier all round. If I ever have to test you with a mind game, rest assured I would be much, much more devious than this. If this is a test, it’s of your fighting ability and your willingness to obey orders.”
Carlos looked along a line of shuffles and shrugs, and guessed a consensus.
“Yeah,” he said. “As long as it’s what you really want us to do, we’ll do it.”
Nicole gave him a wry smile. “Good to see military discipline taking a firm grip.”
She opened a comms screen, spread it out to a square metre on the vehicle’s bonnet and pointed to the objective on the map. It was a leaning rocky outcrop about forty metres high,
a couple of kilometres distant. Half a dozen defenders armed like themselves with knives and AK-97s would be on or around it, tasked with preventing the team from getting to the top.
The defenders, from their own point of view (insofar as p-zombies could be said to have one) were local farmer militia protecting a crucial satellite uplink from an occupying or invading army. No landmines or IEDs, and no drones, but the enemy might well have prepared the predictable nasty surprises: traps, pits, spikes, rocks poised to fall, that sort of thing. They’d have the same comms equipment as the squad. The zoom function of the screens would give them the equivalent of powerful binoculars. They hadn’t been given a specific warning, but they could be assumed to have already spotted the vehicle and drawn their own conclusions.
“Do the p-zombies really believe all this?” Rizzi asked. “That we’re part of an invading army?”
“Yes,” said Nicole, as if it was a stupid question.
“How?” Rizzi persisted.
Nicole looked puzzled. “The AI that runs the sim can give the p-zombies any beliefs it likes. It may have generated these farmers and their farms and their entire back story this morning, for all I know. Or it could have given existing p-zombies the equivalent of a shared paranoid delusion.” She shrugged. “What does it matter?”
Rizzi shook her head. “If that’s how you say it is, fine.”
“Anyone else have questions?”
No one had. Nicole bowed out to Carlos and Beauregard. “Over to you. From here on, I’m just an observer.”
Carlos flipped back and forth between map and satellite view. He zoomed in and out a few times. There was plenty of cover from hillocks, tussocks, outcrops and gullies, but there seemed no way to approach the objective without being picked off as soon as they came within a thousand metres.
His frown met Beauregard’s. “This is going to be tricky.”
