The Ouroboros Wave

by Hayashi, Jyouji

  “The accident is the reason we want to get Sati up and running as soon as possible. Listen, Kurokawa—why do you think Dr. Chapman was killed?”

  “It’s obvious. He shouldn’t have disconnected the speed limiter.”

  “Wrong. The cause was whatever modifications he made to Shiva before he was killed. When he realized that, he was forced to depart from standard operating procedure. Right now Shiva is our only high-level AI looking after resonance control. And this same AI violated its operating protocol by not gradually slowing the truck down. If the safety and integrity of the ring take priority, so does solving this problem.”

  “What does activating Sati ahead of schedule have to do with it?”

  “A lot. Whatever Chapman did, it was like an operation on the frontal lobes of a human brain. Analyzing the logic chains of a high-level AI is no mean feat, even for human specialists. There’s just too much to look at. AI reasoning is very different from ours. Even the people who write the software can’t predict with complete certainty how an AI will behave in a given situation. In a way, that was the whole point of trying to model intelligence. Sati is like Shiva but also different, so we need her help to get to the bottom of this.”

  “I didn’t know you knew so much about AIs.”

  “I have a good teacher.”

  “Oh, you’re just passing on something you got from Kitty.”

  “Why not? We’re logistics. Passing things on is our job.”

  “I hope you won’t mind if I go to the source, then. Kitty?” Kurokawa initiated a link between himself, Tatsuya, and Catherine.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? Stop calling me that,” said Catherine. “Have you disabled your agent’s learning function?”

  “Of course not. Why do you think it always calls you Kitty?”

  “Great. So what’s going on? You know I’ve got my hands full.”

  “Listen, about your procurement schedule—the chief tells me we’re supposed to prioritize Sati. What I want to understand is, why are we using one machine to debug another machine? Chief says our reasoning processes are different from an AI’s. But I mean, one plus one is going to equal two whether a human or an AI is involved.”

  “Are you sure? What does apple plus sugar equal?”

  “That’s not addition. What am I supposed to say—apple pie?”

  “I don’t know. But an AI might come up with an answer to that question, if it was required to do so. Maybe it would say apple pie, or maybe it would decide that ‘apple’ and ‘sugar’ are the same thing.”

  “But where’s the correlation? Is that even reasoning?”

  “Of course. When correlation is obvious we don’t need to reason about it. If we decide that the answer the AI comes up with is meaningless, then we reject its reasoning. So here’s the problem—when we send a human to debug an AI, how do they evaluate reasoning processes that appear meaningless to them?”

  “They could just ignore the processes.” Kurokawa wouldn’t give in, but Catherine was used to dealing with this kind of resistance.

  “You know, it would be so nice if we could,” she said, a hint of enjoyment in her voice. “But what if the AI rejects two as an answer to one plus one? Listen carefully—the AI’s conclusion isn’t important. What’s important is the reasoning chain that led to that conclusion. If Shiva had behaved as expected, he would’ve slowed the truck gradually. But that’s not what he did. And now Graham’s dead.”

  “For reasons unknown,” said Kurokawa. “So that’s where Sati comes in?”

  “Yep. But what makes things sticky is that Shiva isn’t malfunctioning. Shiva—as a machine—is functioning normally even as we speak. Yet he’s demonstrated that he’s capable of reasoning to an incorrect conclusion. It’s not easy to repair a machine that isn’t broken.”

  “And that’s why we’re supposed to upend the schedule to prioritize System Control’s equipment needs. So let me ask you this: what makes you think Shiva will cooperate?” Tatsuya had already asked Catherine this very question. Her look of pity came back to him vividly. “After all, why wouldn’t he rebel?” Kurokawa continued. “He’s supposed to be smarter than we are in some ways. According to you, he’s already killed once.”

  “Kurokawa, you need to get this through your head. Shiva doesn’t know we exist. He doesn’t even understand the world in terms of relations between objects, at least not the way we do.”

  “I can prove you wrong.” Kurokawa touched his wrist, stood, and went to the coffeemaker in his quarters. A few seconds later he held a fresh cup of coffee. “Behold. I give the order, here’s my cup of coffee. Shiva knows which human I am, he knows what coffee is. Otherwise how could he do any of this?”

  “You’re obviously suffering from interface illusion. Shiva doesn’t ‘understand’ coffee. Mr. Black River knows that every item on Ouroboros or the station has an item code. Well, Shiva understands the relationship between the code for coffee and the code for Black River, and that is precisely all he knows.”

  “I’m not Black River. I’m Kurokawa.”

  “And I’m not Kitty, I’m Catherine Sinclaire. Still, when I called you Black River, you knew I was referring to you. That’s because you grasp what it means for there to be an object behind a label. For an AI, the universe is symbols and abstractions, nothing more.”

  “But there’s no item code for Kurokawa.”

  “You used your web,” said Tatsuya.

  “Oh, right. My ID.”

  “Yes,” said Catherine. “Shiva has no concept that a human named Kurokawa ordered a stimulant drink. What he ‘knows’ is that web ID THX-1138 or whatever is in a certain location, and that’s where item XYZ needs to be delivered. When a machine does this, humans think it ‘understands’ what it’s doing.”

  “So what’s all this about high-level intelligence?”

  “It looks like intelligence to us. It’s one of the problems we face in artificial intelligence research. Most of the work being done these days is about the interface, not about teaching AIs to grasp meaning. Basically, most AI work is designed to fool humans into thinking that real intelligence is present.”

  The discussion shifted to the container recovery process. After some tweaking based on input from the other specialists online, they voted to proceed with Tatsuya’s plan.

  “Happy now, Cath?” said Tatsuya.

  “Totally. We ran the prelims on Sati and she seems fine. I would like to commandeer one more thing—the temporary habitats that were allocated to East Platform. Can you swing it?”

  “Why do you need more shelters than we already have out there?”

  “A lot of people are going to be working on this. After reviewing the timeline, I think we need to increase the living space so we can stay on top of this round the clock.”

  “I assume Sati’s like Shiva? No remote access?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hold on a sec, let me take a look.” Tatsuya viewed Catherine’s incoming wish list on his web. Everything that AADD moved around the solar system was bar-coded and tagged electronically. It was an old technology that had proven its worth; so far no one had come up with anything better. Tying the solar system together with a vast, smoothly functioning logistics system was one of AADD’s main long-term goals.

  Tatsuya ran Catherine’s request though his database. “You’re in luck. We’ve got at least one of everything you need on hand right now. I think we can get it to you on the next rendezvous.”

  “Perfect. We’ll be ready for you.”

  Tatsuya had Catherine’s request entered into the supply chain almost before she rang off. The cascade of changes was executed automatically throughout the system. Web-activated agent programs were the workhorses for basic tasks, with the higher-level responsibilities of senior team members handled by avatars—advanced programs, often in the form of talking heads that looked and sounded like their owners—that were active round the clock. Avatars could deal with each other on a variety of tasks;
below a certain level of sophistication they were as effective as human support staff.

  “Kurokawa, what’s your elevator status? Can we steal some space?”

  “No worries. You can have some right now.” The board showed a schematic of Amphisbaena’s central logistics module, flanked by the habitats. The status of West and East Elevators, as well as of the payload bays projecting from the central module, was visible at a glance. East Elevator was already moving toward the payload bays, some of which were extending from the central module in preparation for docking.

  Amphisbaena’s logistics module was its main storage depot, with enormous payload bays projecting from either side like the teeth of a comb. Each “wing” of Amphisbaena supported an elevator that delivered cargo to the tips of the station. Containers were in constant motion throughout the system, not only to make the most efficient use of payload bay capacity, but also as mobile ballast to stabilize Amphisbaena’s constantly changing inertial profile.

  The schematic indicated that the new plan was proceeding smoothly. The west tip of the station was nearing its rendezvous with South Platform. The slightly distorted visual showed a bridge extending from the leading edge of South Platform toward the approaching cargo deck. This bridge could shift position along the edge of the platform, extending the time that the station’s speed relative to Ouroboros would be zero.

  Suddenly the board vanished, along with Kurokawa’s video feed. “Hey, what’s going on?” said Tatsuya. It was instantly clear that they had a situation. All data links other than audio went down. It took everyone several seconds to grasp what had gone wrong.

  “Chief! My web’s off-line!” Kurokawa’s voice held an edge of fear.

  “Don’t panic. How could I hear you if it was down?” said Tatsuya. “The intranet’s dropped, that’s all. We can maintain voice contact without full data spectrum.” But for Amphisbaena and Ouroboros to carry out the minute adjustments necessary for their rendezvous the station and ring control systems required common access to the same network.

  “Okay,” said Kurokawa. “Local diagnostics show everything normal, but we’re shut out of the ring network.”

  “Keep sending rendezvous correction data to the buffer. Once you relink with O-Net, purge the buffer. We’ve got to make those corrections.”

  “But, Chief, we’re going to miss the rendezvous with South Platform.”

  “That’s a problem. What about container recovery?”

  “We’re still good to go with the local net.”

  “At least we dodged that bullet.”

  But Tatsuya had spoken too soon. The bullet was on its way.

  3

  THE TEMPORARY INSTALLATION set up to activate Sati consisted of six eighteen-meter standard habitat tubes clustered together on West Platform. The tubes were 4.2 meters across. Rumor had it that the diameter had been fixed back in the twentieth century to fit the payload bay of the old space shuttles. Whatever the reason, most habitat modules were still the same size.

  “Catherine, it’s no use. I can’t get Shiva to acknowledge A-Net.”

  “He won’t acknowledge Amphisbaena?” shouted Catherine through the docking node to the next module. “Come off it!” In this cramped maze of equipment, yelling was faster than using her web.

  Her Systems Integration specialist called back, “As far as Shiva is concerned, there’s no such thing as Amphisbaena, period.”

  “I don’t believe this.” Catherine floated into the next module. Her team had been waiting impatiently for the arrival of the new equipment. One moment they’d had a visual of the approaching tip of the station, the next their monitors had gone blank. At first, those watching weren’t even sure something had gone wrong; it didn’t look like loss of signal. It looked more like Shiva had smoothly shut down the feed. All other systems continued showing normal.

  “Rendezvous corrections with South Platform stopped as soon as Amphisbaena disappeared from the system. Everything else is nominal,” said the SysInt specialist.

  “That’s very strange.” Catherine shook her head, puzzled.

  “Why? Whatever’s behind Amphisbaena disappearing from the system, it’s not surprising that Shiva would stop the rendezvous sequence.”

  “No, I mean this whole situation is abnormal. Shiva canceled the rendezvous as if that were the logical thing to do as soon as he lost Amphisbaena. He should’ve alerted us at the same time. Instead he’s behaving as if everything’s fine.”

  “Shiva thinks Amphisbaena disappearing from the system is a nominal condition?”

  “That’s the most logical assumption. And if so, there’s only one conclusion. Amphisbaena isn’t on the system because Shiva wants it that way.” Catherine grasped a handhold next to the nearest terminal and harnessed herself in to make operation easier in the zero-G conditions.

  As soon as she buckled in the terminal automatically powered up. A few commands gave her access to the AI. The terminal displayed a status summary. Although Shiva could not be modified remotely, as sysadmin, Catherine could view any data she chose.

  Shiva responded instantly to Catherine’s commands; thousands of lines of data scrolled rapidly across the terminal. Catherine winced—her input had been amateurish. In seconds her agent went to work, organizing the data. The mountain of data began to shrink until there was nothing left.

  “Well, you were right. Shiva isn’t recognizing Amphisbaena as a system object. The station is just gone.”

  This was expected. Catherine next queried Shiva on his reasoning in connection with the station over the last half hour. If her guess was correct, there should be a record of data erasure. How it had happened would determine her next step. She was starting to suspect that Shiva’s banishment of Amphisbaena from his universe of recognized objects might have something to do with the events that had killed Graham Chapman.

  “Listen, guys, I need a position simulation for Amphisbaena.” Catherine wanted to make sure this was handled before she got so deep into things that she forgot about it. Shiva might wish Amphisbaena away, but as a physical object the station was still very real. Knowing where it was in relation to Ouroboros could be critical as events played out.

  Catherine stared at the terminal, increasingly puzzled. Shiva was taking his own sweet time fulfilling her request. The readout showed that the data transfer had taken place, but her agent was having a hard time dealing with the result. Finally the answer came back.

  To Catherine’s astonishment, Shiva had presented her with a raw dump of his reasoning processes over the last half hour—not the kind of information a human could evaluate without weeks of study.

  “What’s that? Is he playing games with you?” The SysInt specialist peered over her shoulder at the monitor. The agent program had been smart enough to prepare a summary of the information Shiva had sent. It was now waiting for further instructions. Catherine punched the terminal, erasing the summary.

  “Don’t you need that?”

  “It wasn’t a very human-friendly answer. But now I know a little more than I did.”

  “Just from that summary?”

  “Well, I’m half guessing here, but I’d be willing to bet Shiva thinks there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between Amphisbaena and some other event.”

  “Is that a learning function?”

  “I guess you could call it that. Shiva’s decided that Amphisbaena’s existence was the cause of some event, so he’s rendered the station nonexistent… Hold on a sec.” Catherine entered Shiva’s access code and added a command. A few moments later a graph popped up on the monitor. “See? This plots the number of reasoning cycles over the last hour. It rises dramatically until Amphisbaena disappears from the system. Then it falls to normal again. It’s like Shiva thinks eliminating the station as a system object solved some kind of problem.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Eliminating the station as a system object doesn’t make it physically disappear.”

  “The answer is probably connected wi
th how Amphisbaena appears to Shiva. If object data is the only thing Shiva erased, there’s a copy in system backup. I bet Shiva erases that too as soon as we restore it.”

  “What then?”

  “We create a dummy ID and associate it with Amphisbaena’s object data. The only concept Shiva has of Amphisbaena is as an ID code. I don’t see why that wouldn’t work.”

  “Then we’d better make sure Logistics changes the station’s code to match.”

  “Let’s talk to Tatsuya. We may be locked out of A-Net, but we can still use the voice circuits to work through the problem. And get me that position simulation!”

  4

  “ALL RIGHT. To recap—first, you’re going to restore Amphisbaena’s object data. If that works, we’re home free. If not, we’ll use the new ID and reboot on this side, correct?”

  “That’s right, Tatsuya.”

  “What’s all this about?”

  “I think Shiva’s taken a dislike to Amphisbaena.”

  “You’re kidding, right? What has Amphisbaena ever done to Shiva?”

  “Who knows? It could be anything. I seem to remember that the god Shiva never forgave his father-in-law for forgetting to invite him to a banquet.”

  “Listen, Cath, maybe we better just do what we can to get Sati activated.” As he spoke, Tatsuya was already preparing a new ID for Amphisbaena. Over time he’d picked up a great deal of knowledge about AIs from Catherine. Crew safety didn’t seem to be at stake yet but the situation they were facing was potentially serious. Everyone on Ouroboros and Amphisbaena knew this instinctively. As they worked, Tatsuya made a calculated effort to engage Catherine in small talk. As much as possible, he needed everyone to keep calm.

  “All right, Tatsuya. I’m restoring the file from backup. This probably won’t create any new problems.” Despite Catherine’s studied optimism, half the crew was glued expectantly to their monitors. The rest were too anxious to watch for fear of disappointment.