Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  There was an embarrassed silence until Masaharu spoke up gently to defuse the situation.

  “I agree with Gillian, however from the opposite direction. Human beings have always sought to abdicate responsibility for their own actions. They have handed responsibility for their deeds to their sensei, to their leaders, or to a higher power. I see this yearning for a mysterious all-powerful AI that controls humanity’s actions and seeks to lead them on the path to enlightenment as nothing more than a manifestation of that same desire.”

  Gillian nodded in approval

  “However,” continued Masaharu, causing Gillian to glance suspiciously in his direction, “however, this is just my opinion. We cannot base our actions on the opinions of one person. We must act and plan as if the Watcher is real. This we have already agreed upon.”

  “Good,” said Marion. “I’m sorry, Gillian, but we are treading over old ground here. It has already been established that, for the purposes of this project, we must assume that the Watcher is real. Just as we’ve had to assume that the Watcher did not exist until at least 2030.”

  Constantine felt a little flicker of surprise that they knew this fact. He began to wonder at the need for himself to be imprisoned within this simulation at all. Surely if they knew this they could deduce the rest?

  He looked around the room and wondered again if what he had been told was true. Was he really inside a computer? It all looked so real. He watched a woman un-peeling an old-fashioned chocolate bar, carelessly dropping the strips of foil on the floor before her. She was idly watching the activity below her as she placed piece after sticky piece in her mouth. Again, Constantine wondered at the programming that must have gone into the scene before him. The attention to detail was evident all around him. If he glanced up at the ceiling, he could see the looping patterns formed by the shielded wires as they led to the directional microphones. Someone had twisted blue duct tape around the one directly above him to aid in its identification. Who would have thought a simulation could go to that level of detail? Or was it a simulation? Grey should know, but Grey wasn’t speaking.

  The only safe plan was to follow the course he had agreed upon with Red and Blue earlier: play along, but try to reveal nothing.

  Jay was holding forth. This Jay seemed so much more confident than her equivalent on the floating balcony last night. That slightly lost look was missing here. Was it something the simulation couldn’t reproduce?

  “We’ve got the expert here now, haven’t we? Why don’t we ask Gillian? Is 2030 a safe date to consider as a minimum point for the existence of the Watcher? Does anything in your work in the Oort cloud lead you to believe this to be incorrect?”

  “It depends what level of AI we are talking about,” Gillian replied. “In the context of the discussion at hand, it seems reasonable. There are minimum levels of resources in terms of processing power and memory and so on required to establish an AI as we know it today. Those weren’t really available until 2030.”

  “What about the Martian VNM?” Jay asked.

  “Far too low. That system was first postulated in the 1980s. Okay, they couldn’t build it back then, but they could work out the parameters. The idea of dropping a hundred tons of materiel on Mars and allowing factories to build themselves was just too tempting. The actual design for the system wasn’t fully mapped until 2025. We have complete understanding of how it worked; there is no space in there for a modern AI to form.”

  “Okay,” Jay said. “Then I’ll ask the one question that nobody here has ever answered to anyone’s satisfaction. If the Watcher does exist, where does it come from?”

  Jay sat in the row in front of Constantine. She leaned back, tilting her head over the back of her seat so that she was looking at him upside down. Her black hair spilled down, revealing how painfully thin her face was. There was a wicked glint of fun in her eyes that had been softened in the Jay that had visited him last night. Constantine felt a sudden twisting in his stomach. Blue must have felt something, too. His voice suddenly filled Constantine’s head.

  —Watch it! This could be it! This is what they are trying to find out!

  —But we don’t know the answer, said Red, puzzled.

  Constantine didn’t know what to say. To his relief and surprise, Gillian answered first.

  “No one knows,” she said. “There are lots of theories. My favorite is that the AI was the result of an evolutionary process: lots of tiny AI applets constantly coming into existence and dying, but just enough of them surviving and linking up via the Internet to form a rudimentary neural net. Or maybe it was the result of computer evolution. There were a few projects trying to simulate that process at the start of the twenty-first century. It wouldn’t be impossible that one of them evolved intelligence.”

  Jay interrupted. “I’ve seen estimates from those times, based on contemporaneous technology, that said it would take around three hundred years before artificial intelligence came about by those means.”

  “Yes,” said Gillian patiently. “And other contemporary estimates predicted it would take ten years. Choose which one you want to believe in.”

  “What do you think, Constantine?” asked Jay.

  —Tell her that the estimates for the time taken for intelligence to evolve all depend upon your definition of intelligence, said Red quickly.

  Constantine repeated Red’s words.

  Jay nodded thoughtfully. Masaharu intervened with a soft, deliberate tone.

  “That may be so, but it adds nothing to our discussion. However intelligence was measured back then, whether by Turing test or Lau’s conjecture, has no bearing on our discussion. This is the question we must ask ourselves again: is 2030 a safe cutoff date? Can we assume the Watcher did not exist until then?”

  He paused. Constantine became uncomfortably aware that they were all looking at him.

  —What should he say? asked Red.—He’s got to say something without alerting them to our understanding of the true situation!

  —We may have some breathing space, said Blue.—Look at the stage.

  Constantine’s gaze flickered down to where the first violinist had walked out to join the orchestra. The crowd that now filled the concert hall clapped politely. The volume of applause rose as the conductor followed her out. He nodded to the first oboe, who blew a note, and one by one the rest of the musicians joined in. Constantine always felt a little thrill at the sound of an orchestra tuning up.

  There was a moment’s pause and then the sound of a trumpet. Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony. Constantine smiled appreciatively. Dvořák had been the son of a pork butcher. After composing this symphony, he had left his native Czechoslovakia to travel to the United States of America, where he had been appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music. During his free time, he would often walk to the railway station to watch the steam trains, or to the docks to watch the ships. What would he make of Constantine’s world, where people could travel through the solar system and cause great cities to be built from a few tiny machines? What would he make of the moon colonies, or people such as Gillian who had lived in the Oort cloud? What would he think of people sitting down to listen to his music in a concert hall where recording equipment was set up to blank out as much interior and exterior noise as possible in the quest for near perfect reproduction? A hall where the electronics formed the audio equivalent of a Faraday cage, so that a group of people could hold a secret meeting, secure in the knowledge that their conversation could not be recorded. Only the orchestra, now swelling in timbre as it developed the first theme, could be heard.

  Constantine sat back. He could hear Blue humming snatches to himself as the music proceeded, occasionally pointing out items of interest.

  —Now listen to this: this theme will be introduced again by the basses in the final movement.

  —Never mind that, said Red. What are we going to do when this piece finishes? How long have we got, anyway?

  —About thirty-six minutes, usually, replied
Blue. I’d guess thirty-three if the conductor maintains this gain on the tempo all the way through.

  —Yeah. Well. But what’s Constantine going to say? We’ve got problems. Is this what they’re after?

  —I doubt it, said Blue.—Why go to the trouble of putting him in a simulation to ask a question they themselves have as much chance of working out as we do? How could anyone work out when the Watcher came into existence?

  —Good point, said Red.

  —I say that we just tell them we think 2030 is a safe cutoff date. If that’s the reason they trapped us in here, more fool them.

  —Okay, said Red.—I concur. However, we are merely deferring the problem. We need to know what they are really trying to find out so we can avoid giving them the answer. If we follow our current path of divulging no information, they are bound to become suspicious.

  —Fine, said Blue. How are we going to find that out? We can hardly ask them. “Erm, excuse me, Marion, what is it that we should be avoiding telling you. We don’t want to—”

  —Come on, Blue. You can be funnier than that. No. We’ll have to get Constantine to ask the other Jay. The Night Jay.

  Constantine had half closed his eyes, ostensibly to listen to the music, but really to pay closer attention to the conversation going on inside himself. The person in the seat behind shifted position, pressing their knees into Constantine’s chair back. Constantine straightened himself up, making himself more comfortable, and then pretended to yawn.

  He covered his mouth while subvocalizing, “I’m not sure the Night Jay will have a method of contacting the outside world.”

  —She’ll have to give it a try. What else can we do? answered Red.

  —Fine. Back to the point at hand. What are we going to do when this concert ends? asked Blue.

  —Make our excuses and leave. Constantine is going to have to pretend to be sick or something.

  —Where’s Grey when we need him? Blue asked petulantly.

  —Take his absence as an indication that we’re doing our job properly, answered Red.—He’d be bound to interrupt if we made a mistake.

  —If he’s still there, answered Blue.—Hasn’t it struck you as odd that we still have an independent consciousness? We must be an incredible drain on the resources of the host machine.

  Constantine felt a little shiver of excitement run up his back. The idea had already occurred to him, but he hadn’t mentioned it with good reason. He kept quiet for the moment and just listened to the pair of them arguing. He wondered if they would raise the corollary to that thought.

  Red spoke up.

  —The idea had occurred to me. It all depends how the capture was made, I suppose. It could be argued that we are part of Constantine’s mindset, albeit an artificially amplified part. Imagine a picture being taken, ostensibly of a flower, but capturing the image of a beetle crawling across a leaf in the same moment.

  —And we’re the beetles? Thanks.

  —You’re welcome. You understand the analogy. I’m not sure if it holds, but it is a theory, and a theory that is preferable to another that has occurred to me.

  —What’s that?

  —That we are not the original personality constructs. That we have been planted by the enemy to steer Constantine down the wrong path. I’m sure this has already occurred to you, Constantine?

  Constantine grinned faintly despite himself. “Yes,” he muttered.

  —So why give yourself away? asked Blue.

  —You already know the answer to that, Blue.

  —I know. Because the enemy knew that Constantine would figure out for himself the fact that we might be fakes, so by me raising the idea first, we gain credibility in his eyes. Well, I’ll tell you this, Constantine, I certainly feel real.

  —Of course you do, answered Red,—but you may just have been programmed that way. You may be an AI designed to believe you are Blue, with only the slightest modification to twist you to the enemy’s purpose.

  —Oh, I hate this. And all this doublethink is making me miss the concert…

  —Well, it needed to be said. It may also explain why we’re not hearing from Grey. Maybe they’ve deactivated that personality after yesterday’s little exhibition.

  “And maybe we are not in a computer simulation at all,” added Constantine, subvocalizing. “Maybe it’s just another bluff. Maybe the Watcher is trying to put us off.”

  —That does sound plausible, said Blue.—Just listen to those clarinets. Nobody would deliberately simulate someone playing that badly, surely?

  The concert ended and the meeting broke up in disarray, Constantine claiming that he needed to contemplate what had been said. Marion wasn’t happy. Only one more meeting was permitted. Constantine and Marion locked gazes for some time. Then the group was pulled apart by the random movement of the audience, Constantine joining a stream that swept him down the shallow carpeted stairs and out through a small door at the side of the hall. He walked in quiet contemplation, a ghost in the center of a colorful, chattering crowd discussing the concert.

  They spilled out of the narrow doorway into the yellow evening. The disk of the sun could be seen across the empty plain, sinking beneath the horizon. The city of Stonebreak was slowing down, preparing for the transition to its night-time activities. Constantine slowed to a halt and allowed the crowd to divide itself and stream around him. A forgotten island in the middle of the homeward-bound traffic. The classical columns and entablatures of the concert hall stood behind him; before him lay the wide, flagged space of the fourth level.

  —Look to your left, said Red.

  Constantine did so. There was Mary Rye. She gazed at Constantine in blurred disbelief, then mumbled something.

  —We penitents are all mixed up, translated Red, reading her lips.—What does that mean?

  Constantine noted the bottle gripped firmly in her right hand. The hem of her green skirt was stained with something yellow. Constantine stepped toward her, but she shook her head, turned and began to lurch away in the other direction. She was quickly swallowed up by the remnants of the concert crowd.

  “Mary!” called Constantine.

  —She’s ignoring you, said Red.

  “Thanks, Red,” muttered Constantine sarcastically. He began to run after her, pushing his way through the people. He couldn’t see her.

  “Where’s she gone?” he muttered.

  —Headed toward the elevators to the third level, answered Red.—Look to two o’clock.

  Constantine saw her. She clutched her bottle as she scuttled across the flags, head low and shoulders hunched as if she was trying to make herself smaller. Constantine caught up with her and placed one hand on her shoulder.

  “Mary,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  She turned to him, and her face was a picture of panic and fear.

  “Go away, please,” she whispered. “They told me what they’d do if I tried to contact you again.” She waved the bottle in his face. “They gave me this when I promised not to speak to you.”

  It was a good brand, noted Constantine. He felt a pang of real pity for this poor woman, driven further down the road to destruction by his supposed protectors. Mary turned and began to march away. There was a blur of movement and for a moment there were two Marys. One frozen before him, the other staggering toward the escalators. The pity inside Constantine evaporated instantly as he recognized what was happening. She wasn’t real. She was just part of the simulation in which he was trapped. He stepped forward, into the picture of Mary that remained smeared on the air before him, and the picture vanished as he moved within it. Poor old Mary. Just another object that wasn’t repainted properly.

  Blue pointed it out as they waited their turn in the line for the elevators.

  —I wonder why they’re running the Mary storyline for you? What are they trying to say?

  Constantine walked all the way back to his hotel, stopping on the way for a meal in one of the cafes that seemed to appear suddenly as evenign fell. He
ate sausages and sauerkraut with cold lager and then sat back with a large pot of coffee to listen to the conversation inside himself. Nobody was speaking. In the end he lost interest, paid the bill with his untraceable card and pushed his way back out into the warm night.

  The floating building was parked outside his hotel. Its base hung only a couple of meters above the ground, the lit doorway of his hotel’s lobby shining through the gap. The top of the tower rose up into the night sky; there was a light shining from one of the windows in the higher floors. A dark figure seemed to move within, but Constantine couldn’t be sure. It was too far away to see clearly.

  Jay was again leaning on her balcony, her arms folded on the rail as she watched Constantine approach.

  He grinned up at her as he reached the base of the tower, reminded of Romeo and Juliet. Constantine rather liked this Jay. Her dark hair surrounded her thin face as she leaned over to look down at him and he noted again how much more vulnerable she looked in this incarnation.

  “Hello.” Constantine smiled up at her.

  “There’s something going on,” she replied, looking worried. “About three hours ago there was a rush of activity like I’ve never seen before.”

  —When we saw Mary, suggested Red.

  —Or when we were watching the concert. The time is too imprecise, said Blue.

  —We need to know, continued Red.—You’ll have to ask her. We need to know what they’re after.

  Constantine shook his head. He felt as if he was being nagged.

  “I know, I know,” he muttered. He raised his voice.

  “We need some help, Jay. We need to know what the enemy is trying to find out. We’re being tied in knots. We don’t know what to say or when to keep quiet. We need information.”

  Jay shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer.”

  “Very well. Ask DIANA. They must have some ideas.”