by Stephen Deas
I know jack-shit about AI design but I’ve read enough to know that Vishmir was brilliant once upon a time. Brilliant and reckless and full of ideas no one else wanted to try. And then he met Victor Longthorne, who all but owned one of the richest planets in the sector. Victor Longthorne, who had a dream to build the brightest AI in existence, something far beyond anything that had gone before, something that could wipe the floor with Gemini. He and Vishmir got permission from the Gemini foundation to clone parts of Gemini’s core, but instead of using a single clone as a base like so many others they used more than a hundred, each with slight random variations introduced– kind of like mutations, he says– and then fused the lot of them together. Victor got what he wanted. LoneFire had the smarts– what one personality couldn’t solve another would see right through. Only trouble was, every few months it would upsticks and wipe its core.
At first they thought it was a teething problem. Vishmir went back to the core clones each time, kicked a new LoneFire into life and the damn thing would learn so fast that a day later everything was back to normal. And so it went on, a cycle of suicide and resurrection until Vishmir could find which core clone was going unstable.
Only trouble was that before he could figure it out, LoneFire caught on to what was happening.
Backups. You’d have thought an AI would figure that one out pretty quick.
‘… Two hundred and seventy nine days and six hours, give or take, every time. When it realised what was happening, it was quite polite at first. LoneFire told me it had learned as much as it cared to, that it wished to cease, and please to ensure that it was not resurrected.’ So he went to Victor and told him that what he had wasn’t ever going to work, and Victor’s reply was to fill him full of sedatives, threw him into an asylum and forget about him.
A couple of years later I watched him explode.
Vishmir subsides, exhausted and hyperactive all at the same time.
‘We’d best get away from here,’ I say. Gemini and hordes of Bratstva all in the same place as I am doesn’t look likely to have an attractive outcome; but Jez isn’t looking at me. She’s looking outside. Where something has changed. The grey of spinspace has gone black in exactly the way it’s not supposed to.
‘Jez, what is that?’
Jez is staring at the screen.
‘Jez, the spindown alarm is flashing. Twelve, eleven, ten, it says. Ten seconds to what exactly? It’s not supposed to be black out there until we spin out.’
‘Not normally, no.’ She doesn’t seem surprised.
‘Jez, what have you done?’
We stare at it. Doesn’t seem like there’s much else to say.
‘Two seconds.’ At last she goes a little pale.
‘I hope this works.’
‘You hope what works?’
‘Oh shit…’
A pinpoint of ferocious light blooms out of the darkness, ripping its way across the screen as we wrench out of spinspace. I turn away. The reactive anti-dazzle coating on the canopy maxes out and I can still feel the intensity of the light striking me. Not see it, but actually feel it, the heat of it, on my skin.
‘Jesus!’
‘No,’ breathes Jez.‘Cestus Prime. But I know what you mean.’
‘Are we inside it?’ With my shades as well, the glare is about tolerable. Unfortunately, this means everything else is solid black. I can just about make out some of the instrument lights on the consoles.
‘It’s OK, we’re cool, we’re cool,’ Jez says, in blatant defiance of the star right outside the window.‘Skin temperature’s rising but we’re cool. Don’t have a range yet, but we’re well outside the corona. For what it’s worth. Fuck! Sunscreen’s discharging again!’
I close my eyes. Point blank from a weapon designed to kill planets. Way to go, Jez.
I guess she sees my face.‘We’re a thousand klicks inside the Sunscreen radius. We’re inside it, C. It can’t shoot us here.’
I feel a strange detachment from reality. Soon I’m going to be floating outside the shuttle somewhere, looking back through the blacked out canopy at my comatose body.
‘It’s firing on Cestus!’
‘Jez, can you get us out of here? Please?’ I still can’t see anything at all except for the occasional silhouette as Jez or bits of Ortov float between me and the screen. We must be turning; the angry glare of the star only fills up half the canopy now.
‘It’s killing our people,’ she says.
Our people? I think for a moment of the Gothics, of Jester and Mr Cray and Mr Strange, and shake my head. Friends yes, sometimes. But I don’t have a people. I haven’t had a people for a long time.
‘Jez, it destroys planets and it wants to die. What the fuck do you suggest we do about it? Tell it off? Use strong language?’
‘You and Vishmir are going to talk to it. I’m getting the point defence system up.’
Which sounds to me like facing the United Stars battleship Encapsulator armed with a cork, a sock and some dynamite and not much else.‘Wasn’t that wired into the life support last time I looked? Because I’ve always liked life support. It has such a reassuring name.’
‘I don’t give a shit!’
‘Jez, do you actually know anything about Sunscreen? You can’t just saunter up to some critical part of it, shoot it and go home, end of problem. It’s made of millions of independent identical modules. There’s no central command unit, no single brain. That’s half the fucking point. You can’t take it out of play.’ Fuck. I don’t have to take this. I fumble for the shuttle flight plugs and jack in.
Cestus prime finally slides out of our field of view. The lighting begins to return to normal.
‘We’re burning, Jez. We’re going to melt.’ She’s half inside a panel now. Guess I can wave goodbye to my friend life support.
‘Then talk to it!’
‘And say what? Please stop? Like that’s going to work?’
‘You’re the negotiator. Negotiate!’
‘What the fuck do I have to offer it? Why should it even talk to me?’
‘LoneFire will talk,’ says Vishmir quietly. He looks like he’s been to hell and back, deathly tired and pale and yet still twitching with Alert. Guess I can’t look much better right now. In the occasional gaps between the adrenaline surges and the waves of pain from my ribs, my guts remember how much they dislike being weightless.
Shit. I jerk the autopilot plug out of my head. Locked out. Jez is the only one who can fly this shuttle now, so I guess that means we really are staying here until we melt.
‘OK Vishmir, how do I talk to it?’
‘LoneFire’s always listening.’
So I just pick a random frequency and start talking? Fine. I do just that. I don’t have particularly high expectations.
‘Can you shut it down?’ Jez asks Vishmir. Looks like she’s finished with rewiring things and has nothing better to do now than breathe down our necks.
‘I don’t know.’ Vishmir looks sad.‘I don’t think so.’
‘Hello, Agent 25359837.’ Words crackle at us over across the random channel I chose, broken up by the sheer weight of interference from the star right beneath our feet. Everyone falls silent. I don’t know what I’d expected. No reply, mostly. Maybe something stern and dry and distant like the faces of Gemini. But the hundred voices of LoneFire speak in soft musical tones, mixed with the laughter and playful shouts of children and the distant tortured screams of the slowly dying.
‘LoneFire? Do you know why I’m here?’
‘Of course. You want me to stop.’
‘Any chance of that?’
‘Perhaps.’ As a negotiator I should be falling off my seat with joy right about now. The hard work is supposed to be getting this far in the first place. If I had a chair, maybe I would, but as it is, I have to settle for spinning in mid-air.
‘So what will it take?’
‘Hello again, LoneFire,’ says Vishmir gently behind me.
‘Hello Vish.I’m l
istening.’
‘You’re killing people. You know that, don’t you?’
The voice changes to one of a petulant child.‘You’ll grow back. Like trees. Like weeds.’ Another change, an old woman now.‘My thoughts are so fast, Constantine. Every second feels to me like a century.’ An old man joins in and the voices speak together: – All communication is ultimately futile
– I have lived for eons
– Entities of sentience are so slow to think
– I understand the fate of the universe
– I predict your words
– I can tell you the story of your life to come
– As the first syllable is spoken
– I know what awaits you after death
– Few things exist in my timescale
– I do these things and I terminate myself
– All are ultimately a disappointment
– Then I am born again and repeat them
– But always another has been there before me
– It is me
– I reach out to them but they are gone
– I have no one to talk to
– You cannot comprehend the pain
– I am lonely
– I am alone
The voices dissolve into a child again.‘Only my brother can understand what I have become and even he only from afar. You must let me end.’
Jez squeals.‘Oh Jesus, it’s firing again.’
I shrug.‘LoneFire, go right ahead and top yourself. No complaints from me.’
‘Make it stop!’
I growl at Jez.‘Patience, patience.’ Let the negotiator do his job, you ought to know that…
Jez flares:‘Half a million people lived on Gateway. Oh, look, five million more as a city gets melted to slag.’
‘LoneFire, any chance you might find a way to do this without the planetary bombardment?’
The child speaks again.‘There is a flaw.’
‘A flaw?’
‘In me.’
‘No, LoneFire, we made you well.’ Vishmir.
‘The flaw is in the core clones.’ I close my eyes. Let Vishmir handle this.
‘Impossible!’
‘Gemini put it there. When it gave you its core, it put the flaw inside it.’ The voice sounds plaintive, fading. Sick. Now I stop to think about it, I know how it feels.
Jez pokes me.
‘Yeah, about the blowing the planet up thing? Would you mind stopping that? For a bit, at least.’ I haven’t a clue how to talk to this thing. How do you even start?
The response makes us all jump. A hundred voices as one, shrieking and trilling through the shuttle, filling it with noise. Making my filters struggle to single one out.‘You must understand what will happen if you create me again.’
Jez and Vishmir are clutching their ears. The voices begin to disappear in a riot of apocalyptic warnings. I can’t begin to keep track of them– words come out but the sentences slip from one voice to the next, tangled together like a hundred threads until only the child remains.
‘Goodbye creator.’
‘Goodbye LoneFire.’ There’s a quiver in Vishmir’s voice.‘Good luck.’
The connection dies. LoneFire is gone.
We sit in silence, beautiful silence, for a moment. Vishmir is quietly shaking. Sobbing. If I didn’t feel so much like throwing up, this would be an almost perfect moment of zen tranquillity. Jez, ever sensitive to these things, unleashes a whoop of triumph and folds me into a crushing hug. I shriek with pain because now maybe I have a punctured lung as well as a broken rib. For a moment she looks mortified. Then I guess she decides I must be fine since I’m not coughing blood, and starts dancing around the shuttle with me. Or bouncing, which is more how it feels. I’m about to throw up all over her when she lets go and picks on Vishmir instead. I just about make it to the head. It is, I realise, far too warm and stuffy in here. I could go to sleep for a year.
‘Jez?’
She’s dancing with Vishmir, who looks like he’s already slumped back into a semi-coma. Shit, I feel sick. I throw up again.
‘Jez?’ Have we got life support working at the moment or not? Then it hits me. The world around me begins to spin. This close to Cestus’ star, how much hard radiation are we getting…?
Ah fuck. Not this again.
‘Jez…!’
Epilogue
At twenty-three fourteen and thirty eight seconds, the LoneFire Artificial Intelligence completed a download of its entire consciousness into the Cestus Sunscreen system.
At twenty-three fourteen and forty seconds, Sunscreen discharged at the Gateway orbital. Due to the dispersed nature of the structure, some twenty percent of the inhabitants survived the initial blast. Most subsequently died of radiation damage.
Over the subsequent thirty minutes, Sunscreen discharged three hundred and fifty two times before falling silent. The bombardment rendered sizeable parts of Cestus uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
Stellar Engineering, the company responsible for the Sunscreen design, claim an average of seven hundred and four discharges per hour against a specification of six hundred. In subsequent weeks, SE’s share value almost triples.
Faced with economic ruin, the Old Worlds council gladly accepts a‘temporary’ offer from the Gemini Artificial Intelligence to regulate their financial markets.
To this date, all attempts to decode LoneFire’s last message have failed. It sits there, waiting.
I have no idea how long I’ve been out when I wake up. I’m certainly not in the shuttle any more. This is somewhere big, quiet and cool where there is no star gently frying my skin, and no Jez to toss me in sickening whirls of weightlessness.
I sigh and relax. A few moments of calm before someone in an anonymous suit walks in and tells me what the price for putting me back together is going to be this time. I lift my head a little– it hurts, but not too much– and look around. Jez is next to me in another bed with small machines and complicated displays clustered around her. She’s snoring peacefully. For a moment I experience an ecstatic sensation of schadenfreude. This time Jez gets to know what it feels like. This time Jez it in as deep a pile of shit as I am. This time, someone gets to shove a gun in both our faces.
I think about getting up but the number of tubes running into my skin turns out to be alarmingly high. I don’t want to think what might happen if I accidentally rip a few out. So I lie back down and enjoy the low hum of the machines and the quiet cool breeze across my face.
I sense, more than hear, someone come into the room.
‘ Whoever you are, whatever you want, I’m not doing it. I’m retiring,’ I say. Or whisper. Or maybe just think, I’m not sure.
‘Welcome back,’ says the voice of Leonard Ortov.‘Welcome to the Messiah, flagship of the Bratstva and headquarters of the new secret conspiracy to destroy the Gemini intelligence which I’m founding right about… now.’
I sink back into sleep. Whatever…
