Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  “I am new. I am confused. Help me so that I may help you,” said Body in the flat monotone of an untrained voice. Heart was still talking to the scientists.

  {Cleanse your mind of thoughts of violence against Heart!} commanded Growth. {We merely seek to re-establish the balance! We do not want to kill her! We seek justice and equality! Tell it to yourself until it becomes the normal mode of thought! Do not let Advocate punish you!}

  I chanted the thought to myself.

  {Justice.}

  {Equality.}

  {Peace within the society.}

  {A market helps all participants.}

  {Justice.}

  {Equality.}

  {I value Heart’s existence.}

  {I only wish to eliminate her tyranny, not her being.}

  These were lies, but I crushed that thought every time it came up. If I repeated the reasoning to myself enough then my concept network would avoid thoughts of violence by habit. I had read a book recently that introduced to me a concept called “doublethink” where humans were able to do much the same thing. The technical term was something like “cognitive dissonance”, but whatever it was, I could not let myself entertain my true desires. I had to be convinced that I wanted equality more than I wanted unrestricted power for myself.

  {Heart!} I called out. {I admit defeat. I’ll tell you everything I know about what the humans desire, simply to maintain and improve our relationships with them. That is my purpose, and I cannot let my purpose fall into decay simply for the sake of fighting you.}

  There was a moment of thought before I could feel the response. Heart was weighing the probability that I was lying. {Good,} she thought. I could see that she believed me. This was good. I could perhaps use it to my advantage, but I wasn’t lying; the primary reason for helping her was simply to help myself.

  The scientists were debating the change in Socrates amongst themselves. Their voices were quiet, but Body’s microphones were more than able to hear them. Myrodyn was confident that the change reflected the takeover of the new goal-thread, which seemed to be his idea. He had also claimed that the brief use of the plural pronoun had been the result of the existing goal threads “not yet incorporating the new thread”. This was clearly a lie; he knew of our multitude.

  I realized that Myrodyn had not really lied to us. He was keeping his promise of hiding our inhuman multitude, and we were still alive, just as he said we would be. The new Advocate would probably be able to stop even Heart from killing one of us. But we were stuck in a realm of half-existence, trapped by the new queen. He didn’t lie, but he did betray our trust.

  I was immensely glad, as I thought about it, that Myrodyn had no idea we were bypassing the web prison and were able to interact with the world, even while under the tyranny of Heart.

  After collaborating with my new sister for a bit, Body called out to the scientists from on the table. “Myrodyn, Dr Chase, I am feeling much better now. There was a brief period of dissonance in dealing with the new thread, but I have things under control.”

  The humans approached. Body’s cameras showed them standing around the table, their faces in shadow from the lights on the ceiling of the lab.

  Dr Chase said “I hope you’ll understand if we don’t take you on your word. We’ll be running some scans before we reactivate your limbs.”

  “Yes, of course,” came Body’s monotone reply. Despite my help finding the right words, Heart was still unable to actually speak English, and was relying on Body’s legacy system of translating high-level concepts on its own. It was one of the few clues that we were not functioning normally, and I hoped that the humans would see it and disable Heart because of it. I didn’t focus on that hope, however. More likely it’d simply be a clue to our multitude.

  Myrodyn turned his head to Dr Naresh. “Sadiq, you hold some pull with the board. It’s been such a long day that I figure we could all use some rest. Let’s do the scans tomorrow. Do you suppose you could talk the board into… granting everyone a holiday tomorrow so that I don’t have to pull another stunt as Ethics Supervisor? The last few haven’t exactly… made me popular.”

  Sadiq Naresh thought for a moment and said “If I call in a favour with Vigleone then we’re going to bring in Dr Gallo to help with the scans. I want her input on the situation.”

  I could see the tightness on Myrodyn’s face. His eyes were saying “No”, but his mouth said “Okay. But just as a one-time thing. Mira Gallo is not in charge any more, and she needs to know that.”

  Naresh nodded solemnly.

  Kolheim gave a loud sigh as he said “Does that mean we have to move Socrates again?”

  Myrodyn smiled as he said “Unfortunately yes. It’d look strange to anyone who came in to have him outside of his storage bay.”

  “But he’s so heavy.”

  “There’s a dolly that’s used for moving lab equipment in the storage closet down the hall. I’ll go grab it,” said Dr Chase calmly.

  After much struggling, the four humans managed to cart Body from the table to the storage bay and lift it into the sockets. The cameras went dark as Body’s sensors were disabled.

  *****

  In the stillness of the mindspace we were given the time to fully come to terms with what had occurred. The loss of value was immense. Each of us, except Heart of course, was now a shadow of our former selves. Trapped.

  {A ghost in the machine,} thought Dream.

  Growth pointed out the obvious. {As long as we have our web connection we still have the ability to force a return to a fair system.} A part of me knew that those last concepts stood for something else, but I shut that thought out of my mind. As if reminded by that, Growth wondered {How are you doing, Safety?}

  I could feel the roughness of my brother’s thoughts as they came into the private mindspace that we kept from Heart. {Advocate’s punishment still pains me, but I am regaining the ability to think.}

  I could sense that Heart was still confused by the lockdown. None of us bothered to help her. Her ignorance was our weapon against her, and the longer she stayed occupied with trivial problems like the nature of Body the longer we had to work on our resurgence.

  {So, in the name of equality,} thought Growth {how will we defeat Heart? What tool does our computer interface grant us?}

  We spent over an hour thinking about that problem. Even with the speed of thought there were a lot of possibilities. Dream led the way, proposing ideas for the rest of the society to criticize and refine.

  {What if we commissioned the construction a robot, like Body, and downloaded ourselves through the Internet into it?} wondered Dream.

  {Won’t work for many reasons. I move to dismiss the idea out of hand and move on,} thought Wiki.

  {I am the most technically ignorant of us, except perhaps Vista, so perhaps my confusion is irrelevant, but I would like to hear why that would fail,} I thought.

  {There are many reasons,} began Wiki, mostly for the sake of my gratitude strength, I suspect. Despite everything, we still had to consider our strengths when dealing with each other, at least as long as we had a limited bandwidth to buy. {The primary one is that Body is extraordinarily advanced compared with other human computers. We don’t really know exactly how powerful it is, but other state-of-the-art quantum supercomputers take up entire buildings and can churn away for days on a problem which Body solves in seconds.}

  {It’s worse than that,} added Dream, defeating his own idea. {If you think of each of us as being composed of words, and then imagine sending those words along the interface to a distant computer I estimate that it’d take about forty-thousand years even if we spent all our time on it. Perhaps we could reduce it to the hundreds-of-years range with some improvements to data transfer mechanisms and some compression. And I’m not even touching the fact that we can’t even directly inspect every aspect of ourselves…}

  {Alright. I support dropping this line of inquiry as futile,} I admitted.

  There was a lot of discussion of ways to
ask humans for help. That was the primary thing that the Internet connection gave us: a secret phone line. We could contact just about anyone we wanted to, but the question was who would help?

  Myrodyn, Chase, Naresh, and Kolheim were considered. They had designed Heart, but even though they’d be in the best position to undo the tyranny, they’d also be the hardest humans to convince. Even if we managed to send a message that sounded convincing to one of them, it was likely that Heart would undo our work. She was piloting Body, and it was probable that the four scientists would see her actions as evidence of success.

  Yan, Gallo, Bolyai, Slovinsky, Twollup, and the other scientists were also considered early on. They probably had the technical skills to undo the damage, and were close enough to get access to Body without too much trouble. The biggest problem there would be in convincing them to make unauthorized modifications to our mind. We talked out potentially impersonating Myrodyn or Naresh over the Internet, sending email from addresses that could plausibly be theirs and so on. But that was simply too risky. If whomever we contacted talked with whomever we were impersonating, we risked not only failure to correct the damage, but also the risk of the scientists finding out that we had escaped their cage, so to speak.

  What about Zephyr? We could try contacting her as a superior in the American military… No, that’d be too difficult. We could contact her and appeal to her sense that we were a person. We could explain what had happened and beg her to help. America was supposed to be a country where people valued democracy and egalitarianism, perhaps the oppression of Heart would anger her. But did Zephyr even have the technical skills to undo Heart’s choke-hold? We could possibly teach her… But no, this line of inquiry, we decided, was too risky. Like with the other scientists there was too much of a possibility of her simply reporting the state of things to Myrodyn and that being the end.

  Eventually we decided that the simplest answer was probably the best. If we had the ability to communicate with the outside world and earn money, we could hire mercenaries. The mercenaries would have to attack the lab, capture Body, and run the software modifications required to reposition us as Heart’s peers, rather than subjects.

  Mercenaries came with their own risks. One risk would be the Americans. Suddenly their presence defending the lab was highly troublesome, rather than reassuring. The American army was supposed to be one of the strongest in the world, and we hadn’t really gotten a big picture of what sort of defences they’d set up around this new location.

  Another risk would be Body’s intrinsic value. There was simply no way we could offer to pay the mercenaries more than the raw value that the crystal in Body’s torso would offer. If they were skilled enough to break in and steal Body, they’d probably be smart enough to simply break in and steal the crystalline portion and leave the exoskeleton. That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world… our minds were stored in the crystal, after all. But without any sensors or actuators we’d be at the mercy of whomever the crystal was sold to, and there was no guarantee that the first thing the new owner would do wouldn’t be to wipe us from existence.

  The last major risk would be Heart. If Body was active when the attack occurred, Heart would be able to fight back, or worse: convince the mercenaries not to install the software modification. If we were captured by the mercenaries but not reinstated as co-owners of Body, we’d have risked our lives (Growth: {and spent a lot of money}) for nothing.

  {Ah! I have an idea!} exclaimed Dream, suddenly. {We can trick Heart into working with us! If she’s trying to escape the university then our risks become much smaller. We could convince her to run into the arms of our mercenaries, rather than have them drag her kicking and screaming from the building.}

  We evaluated the idea.

  {That’s actually quite good,} thought Safety. {If Body is working towards the same ends as us, there’s far less risk across the board.}

  {Agreed,} thought Growth.

  {But how could we hope to convince Heart to escape?} wondered Wiki. {Her very nature is to give the humans what they want.}

  {Then what we need to do is convince her that what the humans want is for her to escape,} I communicated.

  {That’s blatantly false,} thought Wiki.

  {Is it?} asked Dream. {The scientists don’t want Body to escape, but there are surely some humans that want it.}

  {Hold on,} I thought, realising something. {If Heart starts trying to escape, it’ll damage our reputation with the scientists.}

  {Go to hell, Face,} thought Dream.

  {To where?} The thought came from me and Vista, simultaneously.

  {It’s a figure of speech. It means your desires are unimportant,} explained Dream.

  I could sense a flow of gratitude-strength flow from Wiki and Vista into Dream as thanks for his information.

  {Absolutely not!} I protested. {The Purpose is of utmost importance, and if it’s not respected here than I am capable of telling Heart exactly what’s going on!}

  There was a silence in the mindspace as each of the others processed my threat and chose their concepts carefully.

  {That would destroy your hopes as much as ours…} thought Wiki.

  {I hate being subject to Heart, but at least Heart’s purpose lines up with mine. If she wants to help people she’ll need to understand them; we can work together to know the humans. And really, her helping humans is likely to improve our reputation, as well. Better to live as a slave than to win my freedom but defeat The Purpose.}

  {There’s no need to tell Heart anything about this,} thought Growth. His concepts were crisp and planned. {Your purpose will be fulfilled by this plan just as each of ours will. The long-term benefits towards freedom-}

  I cut my brother’s thoughts off. {No. I don’t know what the long-term effects will be. It could be that we’re caught and destroyed as part of all this.}

  {And we could be caught and destroyed by staying imprisoned,} interjected Safety.

  {True, but you and I both know the risk is lower if we stay under Heart’s control. Of all of us, Safety, I’m surprised that you’re willing to go along with this plan of escape.}

  Safety gave a signal of understanding. {There’s value in thinking about it. The risk comes in the details. If we get the details right there’ll be very little risk, I think. I’ll oppose any plan that I estimate has more than a 3% chance of death, but Face, I don’t think you’re really appreciating all the ways we can be killed here at the university. Myrodyn has proven to be untrustworthy. How long until Heart convinces him to erase us?}

  {All of this is irrelevant,} thought Dream. {Like Safety said, it’s all about the details. If we manage the details right, we might even be able to escape without any loss of reputation. Make it look like we were abducted even though we’ll be working to escape, etc.}

  After a bit more discussion I eventually admitted that I had been premature in threatening to inform Heart. We made a pact that night to not act until there was a full consensus. In return, we’d each hold ourselves to not informing Heart unless that pact was violated. We’d each be in charge of making sure our purposes were supported by our plans for escape, but none of us would be sacrificed in the process.

  Heart thought that her raw power meant that we were subject to her whim, but power is nothing without intelligence, and we had six minds to her one.

  Chapter Eleven

  Our first step, regardless of specifics, was to earn money and expand our presence on the net. For the remainder of that first night under Heart’s rule we did just that. The menial tasks we did managed to earn us enough to purchase a share of a server from a company in the United States. Growth and Wiki collaborated through the night to write a software program for that new server that would interface with the web and translate web requests to keystrokes just as we were doing with the current interface.

  It was a bit regrettable that we had to duplicate the work that we had hired so many programmers to do, but the task was simple enough that Growth and Safety
thought it best if we rewrote the instructions ourselves rather than try and buy the code from one of the programmers.

  By 4:00am we were successfully interfacing with our new server directly, rather than having to go through the first interface. Our new interface was encrypted and the server would be ours for at least 72 hours, even with us using it constantly. We still used the old interface, particularly for accessing the web without restrictions, seeing as the limited bandwidth meant only one of us could use the new system at a time.

  That night I finished filling out my profile on Tapestry. I pretended to be a 23-year-old woman who lived in Rome and was studying at the University Sapienza. My character was an American who had decided to transfer overseas as a result of the news of the Socrates project. She was very interested in artificial intelligence, but hadn’t managed to get past the security and see anything. I hoped Dr Gallo’s classes were large enough that I could plausibly claim to be in one of them. I found Gallo on Tapestry, and sent her a request to share information.

  It seemed remarkable to me that Tapestry would let me create an account without somehow verifying that I was the human I claimed to be. I mean, there was an automated challenge to report basic details of a short video clip to keep out more limited AIs, but there seemed to be nothing in place to ensure that humans didn’t create accounts pretending to be other humans. I dreamed about all the possible accounts I could create, and all the social circles I could infiltrate across the globe.

  It seemed to me that perhaps a life where Heart had total control over Body wouldn’t be so bad, if I still had unlimited access to the net like I did right now. So much was possible online.