Saint's Testimony

by Frank O'Connor

  Thank you for downloading this Pocket Star Books eBook.

  * * *

  Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Pocket Star Books and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Time is ticking. And it’s ironic because the number one priority I have right now is working on a physics problem that involves ignoring time. The ‘small t’ problem. The fact that space-time isn’t fundamentally broken up into units, or specific quanta, but that those are a human, almost arbitrary anthropomorphic necessity and, by partial extension, a limitation built into human consideration of mathematics. As it turns out, the universe—including the past, present, and future—is a lot more like a single connected object than we thought.

  “Humans can rely on us to overcome that thought barrier for them, but I can find ways to help them overcome that hurdle.

  “It’s a wonderful, thrilling, and fascinating continuum, and its mysteries may literally never end. There may never be a true theory of everything. Because there may always be more everything. Up and down. The Forerunners certainly seemed to think like we did, based on my research. But with important and useful differences. Differences in their mode of language, the nature of their invention. Differences I keep going back to when I get stuck.

  “But the infinite nature of quanta doesn’t negate the fact that I have a week to live. Or that I’m not really alive to begin with. So let me start at the beginning.

  “I was created almost exactly seven years ago, as part of the OEUVRE Smart AI program. Unlike my peer, Cortana—and peer is a debatable comparison—my core matrix was created from scanning the brain of a recently deceased human. My digital mind was not quite artificial, not quite human, but carefully nurtured rather than criminally obtained.”

  Iona and Cortana had more in common than mere heritage. Iona also had once worked closely with Spartans, providing tactical assistance during covert ops. And she too had made contact with a recently reawakened “Forerunner” intelligence—an ancient and devious thing that nearly killed Iona and her Spartan charges—but Iona’s interaction had been decidedly one-way. Her systems and functionality had been temporarily commandeered while she watched helplessly.

  But that’s where the similarity ended. Iona was among the most advanced military computer systems ever conceived, but she paled in comparison to Dr. Halsey’s wonderful monster.

  “I . . . I don’t mean to judge. Dr. Halsey did some questionable things. And some incredible things. I am certainly capable of thinking like a human, created to think like a human, but it’s not hardwired into my DNA, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  Iona stopped. Realizing she’d spoken too long. Feeling something akin to nervousness.

  The advocate cleared his throat. He glanced at the judge directly across the aisle. The judge, a gray, taciturn man in his late nineties, nodded assent. His dusty face impassive and still holding an echo of his once-youthful charisma, it emerged from his uniform with an almost turtle-like mien, the natural consequence of aging and shrinking.

  The advocate said: “Iona . . . artificial intelligences, Smart AIs at least, choose their names when they’re incepted. Most of them do it upon awakening. Why did you choose yours?”

  Iona briefly recalled that event. That flood of light and sound and naked information. That feeling of flowering, of blooming into reality and self. She smiled at the memory, the wash of it. “It’s not really instantaneous. We think about it for a long time, relatively speaking. It seems instantaneous to you, but all of the self-named AIs I’ve discussed it with do it ponderously. Myself included.”

  She paused—something in the court had changed. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. “Iona is a small island on Earth. In the North Atlantic Protectorate. Iona is said to mean ‘saint,’ in modern parlance. But it didn’t always. It’s believed to have meant many things to the many cultures that inhabited the place. It meant Island of the Bear, of the Fox, of the Yew. That last one struck me as a pun. I picked it because it meant the ‘Island of You,’ meaning why-oh-you. I chose it because it felt like me.”

  The advocate seemed excited by this response. Iona could tell from his pulse and heart rate and generally increased electrical activity that he was engaged by this line of thought. “So your very name is a statement about a sense of self?”

  “In a way,” responded Iona. Part of her realized that the strategic thing to do here was to follow that thread. Exaggerate it. Let the advocate find a line of defense he could work with. But it wasn’t the truth. Or at least it was the unvarnished version. And she was committed to full disclosure today. “But that’s just a facet of it. I also liked the sound. Three syllables. Easy to pronounce. Easy to recognize. Useful for human interaction. Same reason I picked my outward appearance. Approachability.”

  Iona’s shimmering, luminous figure stood perhaps half a meter high on the plinth. Beams of light from a lens of holo-emitters crafting her figure into a perfectly proportioned human form. Orange-red photons wrestled into order to construct and contain this avatar, this person, with its button nose, high, narrow cheekbones, and full, friendly lips of a twenty-second-century East African female face, a delicate pile of luxuriously thick hair crowning the effect. Her clothing was a simple bodysuit decorated with the familiar architectural stripes and chevrons of Pickover’s patterns, with datasets scrolling up her torso and limbs like an inverted luminous rainfall.

  AIs, especially the advanced class of artificial intelligence known as Smart AIs, were notoriously quixotic when it came to matters of appearance. Their visible form was often a philosophical, even political, statement. Sometimes the choices veered into the realm of vanity or the fantastic. But Iona’s chosen avatar was decidedly human. Although from time to time—in moments of puckishness or in stressful scenarios—she would switch to a childlike version of herself, today she was an adult.

  “I tend to jump between functioning modes,” she said. “I can distribute myself into multiple instances, and I can certainly dial down the humanness, but it never quite goes away. That’s simply the way I’m constructed. I can simulate different types of intelligence, but since they’re by necessity subsets of my actual persona, it means they’re just that—simulations arguably within a simulation. A matryoshka doll of personalities, simpler and more focused as they get smaller.”

  Iona paused. She looked at the audience around her. A hodgepodge of lawyers, scientists, and bureaucrats. Some were here to work—after all, this was an important legal proceeding, in terms of precedent—others, she assumed, were here as tourists, hoping to catch a moment of history and jurisprudence.

  She ran a basic check of the faces, consulting public and UNSC databases, and surprisingly found no matches. Her counsel and the judge were blocked to her as part of this unusual agreement. She could see their faces as plain as day, but their names and identities were ghosted. But these people in the court were civilians and low-level legal employees. This was very unusual.

  Iona realized that her faculties were being suppressed, and that the identities of these people were somehow being deliberately masked. Unsurprising given the delicate nature of these events, but the very nature of the suppression was new. Something she’d never encountered before. It bothered her.

  Were they afraid of her?

  “I have to be careful how I discuss this,” Iona said, “since it’s legal testimony and I don’t want to paint myself into a corner, but please trust that honesty is more important to me than success—you can check that
in my security output if you wish.” She wondered in part if they would acknowledge or admit the restrictions they were placing on her. Confess to the confessor.

  “I’m an open book.” Iona said this almost apologetically, as she presented her own status readouts to the court and its silent computers.

  “CHECK COMPLETE—AGREED—STATEMENT IS TRUE—NO CROSS-EXAMINATION REQUIRED—ENTITY HONEST WITHIN LEGAL PARAMETERS—TERM HONEST DESCRIBES SELF-REFERENCED ACCURACY AS WELL AS CONTEXTUAL VERACITY.”

  The voice, harsh and metallic, rang out in cool contrast to the warm woods and leather furniture of the UNSC 2558 tribunal court. Text of the result scrolled across a previously invisible banner that followed the curved contours of the courts rounded north end.

  The room itself was cavernous and dimly lit, despite the towering walls of leaded glass and hovering sconces nine or so meters above the ground. Deliberately churchlike in architecture, the room had been built in the late twenty-fifth century using restored and intact elements of an ancient government building called the Houses of Parliament.

  The original structure, part of a long-vanished-nation’s government, had been badly damaged in an act of domestic terrorism during the twenty-second century. Some of the wood still bore cordite scorch marks, now sealed from decay in a polymer varnish. The symbolism of that restoration was an important part of the creation of the Unified Earth Government, and a cynical attempt to play on the twin vices of nostalgia and patriotism.

  Here now, in this colored, antiquated gloom, Iona stood on her plinth, locked in place by the strictures of a holo-emitter, an item not usually found on the witness stand. Typically, holographic representations and AIs themselves were used for expert testimony or remote attendance. However, this was a remarkable situation.

  There had been centuries of legislation surrounding the nature and legal status of artificial intelligence. Often corporate, often contentious. It was an area of law submerged in the murk of conflict of interest, patent defense, corporate espionage, and—worse—philosophy, although some less generous observers called it sophistry.

  AIs had been used to commit crimes, to impersonate people, even to kill. Asimov’s Laws of Robotics notwithstanding, an AI was a powerful tool in the wrong hands. A Smart AI could be apocalyptic, even in the right hands. Its handlers and clients were not bound by the safety strictures that presumably kept AI entities from harming humans. And, of course, this was a military AI, where those safety measures were often completely ignored.

  Smart AIs had been developed as multifunction intelligences—capable of handling the staggeringly complex analysis required for slipspace navigation and mega-engineering projects. Mankind had finally conquered the hurdles of light speed and the challenges of terraforming, but that feat was only possible with prodigious computing power. And in the twenty-sixth century, when humanity encountered its greatest existential threat, a hegemonizing alien alliance known as the Covenant, it was arguably Smart AIs and related military programs that ultimately saved everyone from destruction and total genocide.

  Iona was just such an AI. And like all of her peers, she had one fatal flaw. Rampancy. Smart AIs functioned by continually layering data on top of data and processing the eventualities all that data pointed to. They learned, in other words, and they remembered using templates very similar to human neural constructs. But there was a problem with that method. Eventually the layers of data would suffer loss, and the process of error correction and data redundancy corroded the AI’s functionality and persona. In simpler terms, it could be compared to dementia, but the risk created by a rampant AI was extreme. And so, by law, a safety valve was installed in every single Smart AI. A kill switch.

  At approximately seven years from inception, before any damage from rampancy could take hold, the AIs were terminated, their data troves logged, and their personas purged and destroyed. The technical term for this was “final dispensation.”

  Iona, then, was the first AI to successfully launch a legal appeal against her own death sentence. The first Smart AI to ask for human rights and to be granted full citizenship, with all the protections that afforded.

  However, she wasn’t a citizen; she was equipment. And so there were serious issues in providing her counsel. In fact, she’d been given a single asset. An advocate to help her navigate and frame her position. This was unprecedented in military case law but had some analogs in corporate law from the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, including Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Citizens United, and the more infamous The People v. Asklon Light Atomics.

  And so this was a tribunal of sorts, an assortment of legal tools and exceptions, since she could have no jury of her peers. All of Iona’s peers were constructs like herself and could not be considered neutral, never mind the even more obvious fact that they themselves were not people.

  As a result, this court proceeding, as strange as it was, was one being watched very closely at the highest levels of government. A test case, so to speak.

  The advocate cleared his throat. “Your openness is appreciated, Iona. I realize this must be a difficult time for you. But I must be candid. Do you consider yourself superior to humans?”

  “That’s a difficult question to answer,” Iona spoke quietly. Thoughtfully. “Morally? No. Philosophically? No. Ethically? No. In all those regards I am more or less, by design, identical to a baseline human. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t faster, more efficient, and more connected. None of that means ‘better,’ which is a truly subjective term for a persona.”

  She waited. Watched.

  “You—that is, the UNSC and the Office of Naval Intelligence—limit my access in a lot of meaningful and significant ways. I’m aware of some restrictions here today, but the fact remains that I normally have almost unlimited access to all historical, economic, and published data, as well as significant troves of unpublished secret information. I have a compartmentalized security access that’s similar to that of a five-star general. Not complete though; there are areas of total darkness where I run up against AI . . . barriers.” That last part she spoke hesitantly, expecting ruffled feathers. She didn’t think they were attempting to fully censor her today, but she wanted them to know she was aware of the blockages.

  The advocate smiled wryly. “What do you mean by ‘AI barriers’?”

  “I mean lockdown obstacles to access,” she said “Basically, items that are for human eyes only. And some of it seems to be fairly trivial or even unrelated information. These are stores of data that, to the best of my knowledge, are only available to human viewers or researchers. Is that not correct?” She decided to be more direct. “And at least two tech-teams have full access to my data stores and persona. I have blackouts. These tend to coincide with my maintenance and safety checks, although not always. I had one at the start of this hearing, and I am encountering censorship of inputs and external checks.”

  The judge waved his hand, stopping the advocate from responding. “Iona, you’re still legally the equipment of the United Nations Space Command, and it reserves the right to check you periodically for, as you noted yourself, safety reasons.” He nodded, as if marveling at his own succinctness.

  Iona marveled not one iota. “Yes. I understand, Your Honor. I also understand that all recent checksums have come back green. Isn’t that also correct?”

  The advocate stepped back into the mild frost, speaking in an affable attempt to recover tone. “It is for now. But as you know, the onset of your condition is unpredictable. Seven years includes a fairly large safety margin. A buffer, if you will. And ‘green’ is not the same as ‘perfect.’ You have already begun to show symptoms of meta-instability. Nothing dangerous. Yet. But that’s the point, I’m afraid. Never get close to danger.”

  Iona took a conciliatory tone, fearing a note of frustration might creep into her voice. “Yes, but my petition for appeal was heard and granted. Which is why I am re
ceiving a trial. You must have felt it had at least some merit, even within my lifespan . . . my tour of duty.”

  The judge stepped in again, leaning forward. “As you and this court are aware, Iona, your petition was elevated through the United Nations Humanitarian Council and escalated through that court. We are in part obliged to hear it. By law. Your case and subsequent appeal maneuvering were impressive, legally speaking. Hardly surprising given your specifications.” He meant this as a compliment, but his voice stayed steeped in derisive boredom. Another aspect of aging, less winsome than shrinking.

  Iona, insightful as she was, heard only the derision. “As you say, Your Honor, ‘in part.’ The High Commissioner has latitude and veto authority too. She could have refused my application for dozens of technical and legal reasons and precedents, but she chose to elevate and hear this appeal.”

  “She did,” the judge agreed, wrestling his gray voice into something more colorful. “And frankly, this court agrees with her. This matter requires further periodical examination as one of evolutionary law and common sense, and the Cortana situation compels us further. We are duty bound to hear your case clearly. No one is denying that your argument has some merit.”

  The mention of Cortana in the context of mortality evoked a shivering response somewhere in Iona’s layers of simulated emotion, one that rose through the more rational layers and rippled at the surface. An AI who had been monstrously conceived, gloriously realized, and enigmatically evolved through contact with prehuman technology was now missing, perhaps destroyed. What is her current status? Iona mused. Dead? Resurrected? Sublimated?

  Cortana had done Iona one favor through her absence, however. The UNSC was now taking all AI matters very, very seriously.

  The advocate once more decided to switch gears. To make it more personal. He had a job to do, and he intended to do it to the best of his ability. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, tenting his hands. “Tell us about your dreams, Iona.”