The War in 2020

by Ralph Peters

  "There may still be active self-destruct mechanisms built into it," Ryder said, in warning.

  Savitsky shrugged. "Of course it is possible. But the electronic cradle in which we have placed the subject is a good mimic. How would an American say it? 'Reflexively imitative.' The cradle continues to assure the subject that it is a part of the system for which it was designed. No matter what happens."

  "And…" Ryder began carefully, "what's going to happen, Nick?"

  Nick smiled. "You'll see."

  Ryder stared down at the tiny brain. How on earth were the Soviets going to attack this problem? They were good.

  But Ryder had yet to see them manage anything at the level of sophistication required to overcome the powerful counter-intrusion mechanisms such a system would possess.

  "You know," Ryder said, "I feel almost solemn. Maybe humbled' would be a better way to say it. To stand in the presence of an intelligence so great." He put his hands in his pockets, as if to prevent himself from reaching out just to touch the device one time, the way a man might feel compelled to touch a masterpiece of art. "I don't know. I didn't get much sleep last night. But… I could swear it knows we're here. That it senses us."

  Savitsky just continued to smile. "Oh," he said brightly. "It will know we're here. In a manner of speaking."

  "Nick," Ryder said, choosing his words carefully, "I don't want to blow this. I mean, we can't afford to… make any mistakes. There is… a primary computer system… of which you may not be aware. It's in the United States, in Colorado. We could connect it to this. It's possible, I'd just need approval, and—"

  Savitsky's smile withered slightly, like a flower at the first light hint of frost. "Perhaps that will be necessary," he said. "Later. But I think you will see… that we are not so incapable." Then his smile returned. "Come," he said. "Let's get to work."

  The Soviet turned with an air of decision, heading back for the control booth. It was difficult for Ryder to leave the proximity of the brain. He wished he could simply slip it into his pocket and take it away. To where it would be safe. From foolishness.

  "Come on," Savitsky called. "I want to show you something, Jeff."

  Ryder moved heavily now, the sleepless night returning to haunt him after the flare of excitement he had just experienced. He stepped over electronic switching boxes and loose jacks, more of the weapons of the modem interrogator. In a moment, he was back beside the Soviet in the control booth.

  "Take a look at this," Savitsky said.

  Ryder glanced after Savitsky's directing hand. Nothing much. An antique-looking device of the sort that was used to measure cardiac waves or earthquakes. A crude high-resolution screen of a type no longer used in the United States. Manual controls. Knobs.

  "That looks interesting," Ryder lied. "What is it?"

  Savitsky waited before answering. He looked into Ryder's eyes in the weak light, and Ryder could sense a new, weighty sobriety in the man.

  "It's a pain machine."

  "What?"

  "A pain machine." Upon repetition, the Soviet s tone had lost its heaviness, becoming almost nonchalant. But Ryder sensed that the man was still serious. As serious as possible. "You're the first outsider to be let in on this… development." Savitsky smiled slowly, as if his facial muscles had become very cold. "It's a mark of honor."

  Ryder did not understand. "What does it do, exactly?"

  Ryder sensed the faintest air of maliciousness about the Soviet now. It was his turn, after a host of casual humiliations at the gold-plated hands of the Americans. "It occurred to us some years ago, that… interesting possibilities might come into existence, as artificial intelligence systems and their corollaries became more sophisticated. That, to say it in simple words, these devices would develop more and more of a resembling — is that the right word?"

  "Resemblance?"

  "Yes. More of a resemblance to the human animal. Consequently, they might also develop the same sort of vulnerabilities as the human being. It occurred to us that there must be some way in which a computer could be made to feel pain." Savitsky considered his words for a moment. "The electronic equivalent of pain, to be most exact."

  Ryder slowly moved his hands together in front of his hips, interlacing the fingers, tapping his thumbs. Waiting for information. The concept was utterly foreign to him. He looked at Savitsky.

  "Of course," the Soviet continued, "it's not 'true' physical pain, as you and I would know it. Just as the computer does not perceive the physical environment as we see it.

  "I am speaking of simulated pain, for a simulated mind."

  Savitsky examined his American counterpart's reaction. A small, hard smile tightened his lips. "And it works."

  The gloomy control booth, with its odor of charred wires, had taken on an eerie atmosphere for Ryder. The Soviet was talking about an entirely new dimension of thought in a field where Ryder considered himself competent, and very well-informed. On one hand, Savitsky's speech sounded as silly as a tale about witches and ghouls, while, on the other, the man's voice carried an unmistakable message of veracity, of confidence. Ryder tried to think through at least the immediate ramifications, but his mind kept jumbling with questions of possibility.

  "Your… approach," Ryder said. "It can't destroy the subject, can it?"

  Savitsky's voice was merely businesslike. "We haven't had that problem with the latest variant of our system. As you can imagine, my friend, there has been some trial and error. We found that machines can no more tolerate unlimited amounts of pain than can the human animal. And, you might say, some machines have weaker hearts than others. Just like men."

  "Have you ever tried it on so sophisticated a system?"

  Savitsky looked at him in surprise. "Of course not. We don't possess such a system."

  Of course not. Foolish question. "Nick, I'm honestly… concerned. I don't want to waste this opportunity."

  The Soviet began to lose his patience. "And what, then, is the American solution? What is your alternative? Weeks of trial and error? The cautious stripping of logic layer after logic layer, like peeling an onion that has no end? My country doesn't have weeks. We… may not have days." The anger went out of Savitsky's voice, and he looked away from Ryder, staring off through the two-way mirror, perhaps staring at a battlefield thousands of kilometers away. "There is no time," he said.

  No, Ryder thought. Savitsky was right. There was no time. He remembered the morning briefing. The Seventh Cavalry about to be committed to battle. A world in collapse. And he had been thinking like a bureaucrat.

  "You're right," Ryder told the Soviet. "Let's see what you can do."

  The two men worked briskly, side by side, readying the banks of interrogation support computers. The system was operating on Meiji. In less than a second, the machines could ask more questions than had all of the human interrogators in preautomation history, and they could make their inquiries with a precision denied to human speech.

  Savitsky adjusted the lighting out in the interrogation chamber so that the harshest spots shone down directly on the subject. The electronic jungle that filled the room receded into an artificial night out of which peered dozens of tiny colored eyes.

  "Ready?" Savitsky asked.

  Ryder nodded in agreement.

  The process would begin with logical queries on the most elementary level, trying to get the subject to agree to propositions on the order of two plus two equals four. The complexity was not important. The point was to compromise the subject's isolation, to get a hook in, to induce interaction. The first stage was normally the most difficult. Working in through the security barriers and buffers, it could take weeks to get a military computer to concur with the most basic propositions. But, once you broke them down, the data came pouring out.

  "Query bank on. Autobuffers active."

  In front of them the green lines on the "pain" monitor flowed smoothly, ready to register the subject's reaction.

  Looking at Savitsky's profile, Ryder was
surprised to see jewels of sweat shining on the man's upper lip. The Soviet was nervous, after all.

  Savitsky twisted a dial that might have been salvaged from an antique television set of the sort Ryder remembered from his grandmother's living room, where the device had delivered the world to a child snowed in on the Nebraska prairie.

  The lines jumped on the response meter. The bright movement was startling in the darkness, and Ryder reacted as though he himself had received a slight shock.

  The language flow reader registered a negative response. Savitsky quickly turned the "pain" back down, and the green lines settled, trembling for just a moment, then resuming their smooth, flat flow.

  "Well," Savitsky said. "Now we try again."

  He gave the dial a sharp turn.

  The green lines fractured into jagged ridges and valleys, straining toward the borders of the monitor. But the interrogation support computers continued to report negative interaction.

  Perspiration gleamed on Savitsky's forehead. He turned the control back to its zero position, and said, "You know, when I was beginning my training, so many years ago, everything started with the theory of interrogating humans. I had not yet specialized in automation. That came later. Anyway, they told us that the breakdowns often came very suddenly, that it was important not to feel despair. You might think, oh, I am never going to break this subject. But you had only to persist. Because, in the end, everyone broke." The Soviet stared out through the window, to where the miniature electronic brain lay still under the spotlights. "It will be interesting to see if the same holds true for machines."

  Ryder followed his counterpart's stare. Certainly, there had been no visible change in the subject. Just a small, obviously inanimate black rectangle that looked as though it had been hewn from slate. Yet, he imagined that something about it had altered.

  You need a good night's sleep tonight, he told himself.

  "I'm going to break this bastard," Savitsky said, his voice full of renewed energy. It was unmistakably the energy of anger.

  The Soviet twisted the dial again, jacking up the intensity well beyond the previous level. Whatever the machine was doing, Ryder only hoped that it would not destroy the captive treasure for nothing. In the name of some arcane mumbo jumbo.

  The green lines on the monitor went wild. There was, of course, no sign of movement, no physical reaction from the subject. But Ryder suddenly felt something unacceptable in the atmosphere, a change that he could not put into words but that felt distinctly unpleasant and intense.

  The unexpected flashing of the language flow reader, where an interrogation's results were reported, made Ryder jump.

  The screen merely read, "Unintelligible response."

  But that was where it started. It was the beginning of interaction, a sign of life.

  "Jesus Christ," Ryder said. "You're getting something, Nick."

  Beside him, the Soviet was breathing as heavily as if he had been delivering blows to a victim's head. He stared at Ryder as though he barely recognized him. Then he seemed to wake, and he turned the system's power down once again. The green lines calmed, but never quite regained their earlier straightness. They appeared to be shivering.

  "I wonder," Savitsky said, "if our computers could understand the nature of a scream."

  He twisted the dial again, sharply. With a grunting noise that was almost a growl, he wrenched it all the way around, focusing on the captured computer brain out on the interrogation table with something that resembled hatred. He kept his hand tightly fixed to the control, as though he might be able to force just a bit more power out of it that way.

  The green lines on the "pain" register rebounded off the upper and lower limits of the screen.

  It could not be true. Ryder refused to let himself believe it. It was only the result of too little sleep and bad nerves, of allowing oneself to become too emotional. It was crazy. But he could not help feeling that something was suffering.

  Tonight, he promised himself, he wouldn't be such a stick-in-the-mud. He needed a few beers. To relax. To sleep.

  Machines, Ryder told himself, do not feel pain. This is absurd.

  Savitsky turned the dial down as though he were going to give the captured computer a respite, then, without warning, he quickly turned the intensity up to the maximum degree again.

  Ryder felt an unexpected urge to reach out and halt the work of the other man's hand. Until he could get a grip on himself, sort things out.

  You silly bastard, he told himself. It's just a machine.

  And machines don't suffer.

  Savitsky ignored him now. The Soviet was spitting out a litany of Russian words that could only be obscenities. He had bent himself over the control panel in an attitude of such tension and fury that Ryder expected the man to lash out with his fists.

  The monitor registered a craze of green lines.

  There is pain in these rooms, Ryder thought. He tried to catch himself, to tell himself yet again that machines do not feel pain, but as he watched the tiny captive brain he imagined he was watching a grimacing, sweating, agonizing thing.

  He lifted his hand toward Savitsky, whose face had become almost unrecognizable.

  Suddenly, the entire bank of computers whirled to life. The eruption of corollary light from monitors and flow screens indicated that the machines were working frantically, pushed nearly to their capacity. The control booth dazzled with light issuing from all angles in staccato bursts.

  Savitsky remained bent over the dial, covering it with hands like claws.

  The main language flow reader began to flash, announcing a message from another world. Then the flow of characters began, in the peculiar language of top-end Japanese computers, repeating the same simple message over and over again:

  "Please. Stop."

  The data take was so voluminous that it quickly overloaded several of the Soviet storage reservoirs, and it kept coming, a deluge of information. But the two interrogators gave no sign of elation. They simply sat in the control booth without speaking to each other, without even acknowledging the other's presence. Each man was trapped in his own private weariness, his own confusion. Soon, linkages between data banks would need to be established, and superiors would need to be informed. The vast military bureaucracies would need to be moved to take advantage of the incredible range of opportunities that now presented themselves. But neither man was quite ready to start.

  Finally, Ryder forced himself to climb out of the theoretical swamp through which he had been slopping, to consider the practical applications. There was a possibility of literally taking the enemy's war away from them. Their artillery could be directed to fire automatically on their own positions, their aircraft could be directed to attack their own troops. An entirely false intelligence picture could be painted for the enemy commander, lulling him to sleep until it was too late. The possible variations were endless. And there was only one catch: someone would have to sit down at a fully operative Japanese command console — the higher the level, the better — to infiltrate their network.

  Ryder was confident. Nothing seemed impossible anymore. He felt his energy returning, compounding. He began to think about the best way to present the information to his superiors, to help them see the full possibilities, to get things going.

  "Nick," he said. When Savitsky did not respond, Ryder touched the man's knee. "Nick, we've got to get moving."

  The Soviet snorted. He looked exhausted, as if he had not slept for days, for years. He had given everything he had, and now he sat drained, his tunic sweat-soaked.

  There would be a thousand problems, Ryder realized. But he was confident that each could be solved.

  Savitsky blinked as though something was bothering his eyes, then he looked away. His limbs, his hands appeared lifeless.

  "Yes," he said.

  Looking at his weary companion, Ryder suddenly had a sense of things far greater than any single man, of things beyond words, of worlds in motion and the power of hist
ory. The hour of the Americans had come.

  11

  Baku, the Provisional Islamic Republic of Azerbaijan

  2 November 2020

  General Noburu Kabata sipped his Scotch, marveling at his unhappiness. Professionally, he had every reason to be pleased. The offensive continued to make splendid progress. The Soviets were all but finished east of the Urals, and they were in serious trouble between the Urals and the Caucasus. None of the problems within the friendly forces appeared insurmountable, and there was no apparent reason why all of the military goals of the operation should not be fulfilled. This was a time for joy or, at least, for satisfaction. For, even though his status was nominally that of a contract adviser to the Islamic Union and the government of Iran, this was his operation, the highlight of his career, and a triumph for Japanese policy. Yet, here he was drinking Scotch on an empty stomach, in the morning.

  His father would not have approved. His father, who had pushed his eldest son to become a master of the golf club, rather than of the sword, as had been the family tradition. In Japan, he remembered his father saying, there was nothing more important than the ability to play a good round of golf — even for a general. And he remembered the vacation on which he had accompanied his father, so very many years before, to the golf courses of Pebble Beach, in California. He remembered the perfect greens along the stony, splashing coast, the remarkable private homes set among the cypresses, and his father's quiet comment that someday these careless, irresponsible Americans would be their servants.

  His father had loved Scotch. He had trained himself to appreciate it, just as he later conditioned his son to the gentleman's drink of choice. So much was handed down. The tradition of bespoke suits from H. Huntsman & Sons of 11 Saville Row, the preference for the links of Scotland, the family military tradition that was older than the game of golf or the patent of any tailor shop. He knew his father would have been very proud of his military record, graced with achievements of a sort denied the older generation. But the elder general would not have approved of the consumption of alcohol in the morning, on duty.