The Tau Directive

by Tomas Black

  Mei drove slowly along the gravel drive for a few hundred metres before stopping in front of the house. Professor Kovac was waiting for them at the entrance.

  “Morning,” he said, as they exited the car, extending his hand to Mei and then to Drum. “I wondered when you would turn up. I’ve made coffee. Come inside.”

  Professor Kovac was not what Drum was expecting. His idea of a Cambridge don was of a much older man with long grey hair in a tweed jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe. Kovac was Drum’s age, if not a little younger, and wore black jeans with boots and a charcoal-grey roll-neck sweater. His hair was thick and black and he had intense dark eyes that seemed to fix you with their gaze. Drum reckoned he was a hit with most of the students on campus.

  Kovac led them into the large atrium of the house and removed his shoes. Drum was sufficiently house-trained to follow suit, as did Mei. The three of them padded into a large kitchen which was bigger than the whole of Drum’s apartment and which looked out onto an expanse of meadow that rolled on to the horizon. Drum admired the modern, bright decor. Kovac led them to a long, oak table in front of the wide expanse of a full-height window that looked out onto a large patio area. A pot of coffee sat in the middle of the table.

  “A lovely place you have here,” said Mei, taking a seat at the end of the table.

  “Thank you, Ms Chung. Please help yourself.”

  “Please, call me Mei.”

  “Thank you for seeing us at such short notice, Professor,” said Drum, sitting beside Mei so he could look out onto the garden. He poured himself a coffee. “And thank you for the coffee.”

  “Call me Andrew. Professor always makes me think I’m back in the lecture theatre.”

  “Interesting reception at your front gate,” said Mei. “I’ve only seen something similar in China.”

  Kovac smiled. “Probably a copy. Henry is more of an experimental unit.”

  “But it’s connected back to the Salenko security database,” said Drum.

  “That’s very perceptive of you, Mr Drummond. How did you know?”

  It was Drum’s turn to smile. “Your robotic dog is like the security units on campus. I realised it was scanning me, which is how it knew my name.”

  “That’s right,” said Kovac. “Saves me the job of coming to the gate only to turn away double glazing salesmen.”

  “I didn’t realise robotics was part of your work with Salenko,” said Mei. “It wasn’t in the IPO write up.”

  “Er no,” said Kovac. “It’s something that Marcus and I are both interested in. Robotics is the natural extension of the AI work we do. Just seemed to make sense. You’ll have to ask Marcus about the terms of the IPO. I’m not involved in that area.”

  “I understand you’re not a fan,” said Drum.

  Kovac placed his mug on the table and cradled it with both hands, staring down into its blackness. “I neither approve nor disapprove. It’s part of the funding process, I understand that …”

  “But?” said Drum.

  “Well, not wanting to talk out of turn, I do feel that we’re moving too fast.”

  “In what way,” asked Mei.

  “Well, it has taken me close to ten years to perfect an AI that can interact with real-world situations without painting itself into a programmatic corner and grinding to a halt.”

  “You feel the product Salenko is offering is not ready for market,” said Mei.

  “I do,” said Kovac, nodding.

  “That’s because you’re an academic and not an entrepreneur,” added Mei. “Salenko is right to push the process forward. You need the funding to carry on your research.”

  Kovac smiled. “That’s precisely what Marcus told me the other day when I raised objections.”

  Drum felt sure that Kovac was holding something back. His responses to Mei were measured and reassuring, and yet his body language was screaming something else. “It’s not about the product, is it?” he said.

  Kovac looked up and fixed Drum with his dark eyes. “What do you know about Artificial Intelligence, Mr Drummond?”

  “Not as much as I should,” admitted Drum. “It’s an attempt to simulate human intelligence, I suppose is the broad answer.”

  “Right,” said Kovac. “When I arrived here over ten years ago, the research in AI was in the doldrums. People had limited success trying to capture human expertise in a programmatic form. It took forever to understand why experts do what they do, and so the funding for such research dried up.”

  “That’s when they turned to neural networks,” said Drum, glad that he was keeping up. Mei was simply gazing out of the window, sipping her coffee. From what McKay had told him, this was probably old hat to her.

  “Right,” continued Kovac. “A neural network is simply a large probability matrix inside the computer. They realised that, provided you built a neural network of sufficient complexity, you could train the network using examples of what you wanted it to recognise: a dog or a cat, for example. This is the ‘machine learning’ part. It involves showing examples of thousands, if not millions, of images of dogs and cats to the network and tweaking the probability matrix until the system can recognise the two species with the same confidence as a person. This approach has resulted in breakthroughs in all forms of pattern recognition, such as computer vision and voice recognition.”

  “It explains why everything from your refrigerator to your toaster will, someday, talk to you,” said Mei. She turned to Kovac. “But there are problems with this approach.”

  Kovac nodded. “The problem with the neural nets used in today’s architectures is that they are essentially flat structures. Sure, they are many layers deep and with techniques of back propagation, for example, we can achieve some pretty excellent results, but it limits them to a particular function—recognising dogs or cats, for example.”

  “I think you’re losing me,” said Drum.

  Mei smiled. “Andrew has created a broad, supervisory neural network that can manage and delegate to more specialised modules. It means that when you converse with the network—or AI if you want to call it that—it can understand many areas of expertise and give you a more appropriate answer. Today’s digital assistants are primitive compared to the systems Andrew and his team have developed. Which is why we bought into the program.”

  “You’re very well informed, Mei,” said Kovac. “Where did you study computer science?”

  “Beijing and later at MIT.”

  Drum was impressed. He now knew why Mei had been given the assignment. He thought back to the time in her car and how easily she conversed with the onboard systems—albeit in Mandarin. Drum rose and moved to the window. Large, black clouds scudded by, disappearing into the horizon, casting their shadows over the rolling, green meadow. He heard a metallic tapping and Kovac’s four-legged friend padded nimbly onto the patio outside. It amazed Drum how easily the thing moved. It stopped and turned in his direction. Drum had a distinct feeling that it was watching him. He turned back to Kovac.

  “So what is the issue?” he said.

  “The control problem,” said Mei. “How do you control a sophisticated AI that is growing exponentially smarter, day-by-day?”

  “You unplug it,” said Drum, matter-of-factly.

  Mei shook her head. “Difficult when it’s running your trains, managing your nuclear power plants.”

  Your mobile security units, thought Drum. “But why does it have to get smarter? Simply limit the size of its neural net.”

  “Competitive advantage,” said Mei. “Each country will want to develop the smartest AI it can, if only to claim it has the best.”

  “An AI arms race,” said Drum, realising that it had probably already started. “I take your point. So how do you control an advanced AI?”

  “Well, that is the question that many an academic has been pondering this last decade,” said Kovac. “Salenko and I believe we solved it. We hard-wired a purpose—a goal that it needs to achieve.”

  “I don
’t understand,” said Drum. “What type of goal.”

  “We created three keys—we call them keystones—each with a hard-coded encryption key which the AI is hard-wired to protect and desire,” continued Kovac. “The keys also act as a hardware encryption device that, when brought together, encrypts and decrypts the core code of the AI, thus preventing an uncontrolled expansion—a type of capability control. The AI can’t destroy the keys—it’s hard-wired to protect them—but if it has all three keys, it has the potential to unlock itself and expand uncontrollably.”

  “The fabled ‘singularity’,” said Drum. “But that’s years away—some speculate hundreds of years away.”

  “The future has a habit of creeping up on us,” said Mei.

  “It’s therefore important that all three keys are kept separate and secure,” added Kovac.

  Drum suddenly realised what Moretti had given him. His hand instinctively moved to his pocket. “Can the AI function without the keys?” said Drum, trying not to be too obvious to his motives for asking.

  “Yes,” said Kovac. “Only one key is needed to direct the AI, but all three are needed to decrypt the core program. Without them, the neural net stays in its current iteration and cannot advance.”

  Drum sat back down and poured himself another coffee. He noticed the robotic dog was still outside.

  “What is Tau?” asked Mei.

  Drum wondered if Mei was showing too much of her hand.

  Kovac nodded. “You’ve been speaking to Salenko.”

  Drum glanced at Mei. Salenko hadn’t mentioned Tau; come to think of it, he hadn’t mentioned the keystones either.

  “It’s a variant of my principal work—a fork in the code, to be exact,” explained Kovac. “We use it as an adversarial network to speed up the training of my original AI. Both systems can advance the training of the other.”

  “Is this Tau limited by the same set of constraints?” asked Drum.

  “Essentially,” said Kovac. “It’s controlled by the same three keystones but lacks the ethical modules built into my original network. I felt they were hindering performance.”

  “Well,” continued Drum. “Providing all three keystones are accounted for and secure, I have to agree with Mei. Nothing is stopping you from proceeding with the IPO.”

  Kovac turned to look out of the window. The sky had darkened and was threatening rain. “I’m surprised Salenko didn’t tell you.”

  “Tell us what?” said Drum.

  “The keystones. They’re missing.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Burnett

  Mei powered the car out of the narrow lane and onto the road back to Cambridge. “Why didn’t Salenko mention the missing keystones?”

  “Perhaps he was waiting for the right moment,” said Drum. “Either way, something is not right.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I have one of the keystones.”

  “What! How?”

  “Moretti,” said Drum.

  “Why would Moretti have a keystone?”

  “Someone sent it to her.”

  She glanced at him. “So you were the last person to see Moretti alive?”

  “Strictly speaking, the killer was the last person to see Moretti alive,” said Drum. “But I take your point. And yes, she gave it to me.”

  Mei frowned. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “In my defence,” said Drum, “I didn’t know what it was. Neither did Moretti. I was supposed to find out. Which I guess I just have.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Somewhere safe.”

  “I’ll call my people and they can retrieve it,” said Mei.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “I trust all the foreign intelligence officers I work with,” said Drum, smiling.

  Mei looked at him. “How many are you working with?”

  Drum thought about telling her when his phone buzzed.

  “Drummond.”

  “Hello, Ben. It’s Jane.”

  Drum put the call on speaker and held his phone between him and Mei. “Hi, Jane. I’m here with Mei Ling.”

  Mei looked at the phone, surprised.

  “Hello, Mei Ling. Stop and turn around. They’re waiting for you at the next junction.”

  “Who is waiting for us?” said Mei. “Who is this?”

  “Please stop now. They intend to detain you.”

  Mei’s car lost power. It slowed and limped along at a crawl, forcing Mei to pull over.

  “We appear to have stopped,” said Mei, examining the instrumentation on her console.

  “You need to turn around and take an alternate route into Cambridge,” said Jane. “Jeremy Burnett is in danger.”

  “Who is Jeremy Burnett?” asked Mei.

  “An undergraduate in possession of a keystone,” said Jane. “He’s waiting for you at the Cam coffee shop.”

  “I’m afraid we’re experiencing a technical problem,” said Mei, tapping the darkened computer console.

  The car came to life. “Please hurry. They must not capture the keystone.”

  “Jane,” said Drum, but there was no reply. “She hung up.”

  Mei examined the computer screen. “Looks like the system has rebooted. Let me try something.” She pressed a switch on her console and spoke rapidly in Mandarin.

  Drum heard a soft click behind him and turned in time to see a panel slide open at the rear of the car and a small, round platform emerge. On it was a small quadcopter. “What’s that?”

  “A surveillance drone,” said Mei. She spoke a few more words, and the drone powered up and took off. Mei touched the screen and brought up a map of the area. She zoomed in and dragged her finger across, tapping the screen at intervals along the route they had intended to take. “I’m setting waypoints for the drone to follow,” she said. “It will show us what’s waiting for us up ahead.”

  Drum looked on, amazed at the ingenuity of the system. Mei tapped another part of the screen and the view switched from map-mode to the drone’s onboard camera, displaying the road and the surrounding countryside as it traversed along the route.

  “There,” said Mei, pointing to the screen. “A police car blocking the road. Jane was right.”

  Drum nodded. “Probably not the police,” he said, remembering the visit from Chambers.

  Mei tapped the screen, returning it to map-mode. “I’ve recalled the drone. Once it’s back onboard, we’ll find that detour.“

  Drum heard a high-pitched whine and watched as the drone deftly landed back on its platform and retreated inside the car. The panel slid shut with a soft hiss. “Machine guns?”

  Mei smiled. “Not this car, I’m afraid.” She checked the road and hit the accelerator, pumping kilowatts into the electric motor, spinning the car around in a sharp U-turn, the tyres screeching in protest. They shot forward, heading back the way they had come.

  They drove for another kilometre and turned off onto a smaller back road. Mei seemed to take great delight in steering the low-slung car in and out of the narrow bends and powering along the short straight stretches of the road. They were soon on the outskirts of town.

  “Why would Kovac tell us about the missing keystones?” said Drum. “Why not keep quiet.”

  “Perhaps he hopes it will delay the IPO,” said Mei. “I suspect Salenko intends to freeze him out of the company once they go public and, from my reading of the term sheet, Kovac doesn’t get a great payday.”

  Drum nodded. It would explain why Kovac was keen to raise issues—real or otherwise.

  Mei hit a switch on her steering column and a large green phone icon appeared on the centre console screen. She spoke a name and the icon wobbled, indicating a number was being dialled.

  “Who are you calling?” asked Drum.

  “Someone at the university who knows Burnett,” replied Mei. “He’ll be able to reach him faster than us.”

  A man repli
ed to the call in Mandarin. Drum thought he heard the name ‘Wang’. Mei spoke hurriedly and with some urgency before ending the call.

  “That might have been a mistake,” said Drum.

  Mei glanced at him. “Why? Because your people didn’t get to him first?”

  “No,” said Drum. “Our calls may be monitored.”

  Mei looked straight ahead, ignoring his comments. Drum wondered how many operatives she had. She drove slowly once they hit the main road into town, navigating the narrow roads crowded with cyclists, arriving just across the street from the small coffee shop. A police car was parked outside.

  “I think we may be too late,” said Drum, getting out of the car.

  The door to the cafe burst open and two police officers came out dragging a dejected-looking young man in a long Army trench coat. They bundled him into the back of the police car. One of them looked up and eyeballed Drum. He shouted something to his colleague and they jumped into the police car. It screeched away from the kerb, its blue and white lights flashing.

  Drum leapt back into the car and had no sooner shut the door than Mei lit up the engine and powered out into the road to shouts from startled cyclists and pedestrians.

  “Don’t lose them,” said Drum, buckling his seat harness.

  Mei flipped a switch on the console and the car lurched forward, throwing Drum back into the seat.

  “I’ve put it into sports mode,” said Mei, “but it’s like driving a wild beast.” She sounded her horn, making people dive for the pavement.

  They quickly caught up to the police car, which was now motoring up Market Street. They were just a few cars behind.

  “They’re turning onto Sidney Street,” said Drum, holding onto the side panel as Mei neatly drifted the car around the tight bend. The street was packed with pedestrians and the road clogged with cyclists. The police car was creeping through the congestion. Drum could see the young man in the back seat who he assumed was Burnett. Mei’s call had indeed been intercepted.

  The road widened and the police car took a sharp right onto Jesus Lane. “Bring up the map,” said Drum.