Stolen Earth, page 18
“The specifics of this installation are classified,” One replied. The voice didn’t come from the orb. Instead, it seemed to come from the elevator itself. There were no buttons, no speakers, no cameras, and the damn thing was so smooth that Gray barely felt the lurch of motion as it started to descend.
“Is okay,” Federov said. “Captain has top-secret clearance.”
“Issued, I presume, through your Sol Commonwealth. Unfortunately, there are no treaties on record with the Sol Commonwealth that would validate such clearance.”
“It was joke,” Federov growled, shifting from boot to boot, gear rattling slightly. Gray appreciated the noise—it distracted him from the fact that the elevator was moving down at what felt like a significant rate of speed.
“Where precisely are you taking us, One?” Hayer asked. “I understand not wanting to talk in the open. There are dangers out there. But you seem fully capable of conversing with us just about anywhere. Why are we going into your top-secret command bunker or whatever?”
“Because it will more easily facilitate coming to an agreement.”
The words were cryptic, but Gray felt his stomach drop—faster than it already was from the elevator—as the AI spoke them. “Because we’ll be fully within your power?” he asked. He felt more than saw the others as they stiffened and made conscious efforts not to reach for their weapons.
“You have been fully within my power since you entered my airspace, Captain Lynch. But your species has a saying, ‘Seeing is believing.’ I think it will make our conversation much simpler if I can provide certain visuals while we talk. We will be arriving… now.”
The elevator came to a stop. As the doors opened, the dog darted out, not waiting for the floating orb. Gray watched it run for a moment, admiring the graceful loping stride. He realized then that no one else had moved. The floating metal orb was simply sitting in the elevator.
“My apologies,” One said as the moment stretched on. “I forget sometimes that you do not fully understand how I work. Please, disregard the drone and exit the elevator. As you are now within the walls of the installation, such devices are not necessary.”
“Maybe we should have followed the dog,” Morales muttered.
“Bandit is heading to his food bowl, Ms. Morales,” One replied. “While I do not fully understand human tastes, I do not think you would find it particularly appetizing. I am sure that after his meal and post-meal ablutions, he would appreciate the touch of a warm-blooded being. There are social aspects of mammals that I cannot simulate well.”
That was an odd tidbit and one that Gray stored away for potential later use. Of course, it begged the question, why did One bother with Bandit in the first place? But that, too, was a question for another time.
“So, where do we go?”
In response, the hallway, which until that moment looked exactly the same as the one above, changed. A glowing line lit one wall, a faint pale luminescence against the backdrop of featureless gray. “Follow the illuminated path.”
They did, Gray taking point and the others fanning out, putting Morales and Federov on either flank, Hayer in the middle, and Bishop watching their six. The hallway was built to the scale of many industrial facilities that Gray had seen—about ten feet wide and just as tall, the walls featureless except for the illuminated one. It stayed that way for a solid five minutes of walking before the light along the wall ended.
Then the wall spiraled open, revealing a circular doorway that had not been there a moment before. Gray was past the point of surprise and stepped through the door without really thinking about it. Then he stopped in his tracks. The hallway had been built to an industrial size, but the chamber into which he stepped was built to a scale normally reserved for high-impact craters or mining installations. The walls had a flowing, almost melted look about them and from the ceiling, far overhead, protruded hundreds of jagged outthrusts of rock like so many teeth. The floor, at least, was smooth and flat, surfaced in the same composite on which they had been walking since entering One’s abode.
That floor was taken up with machinery. Or so Gray supposed. There were endless arrays of featureless rectangular boxes, formed from the same composite as the floor and standing like a sterile forest. In some places, they were packed so tightly together that Gray would have to turn sideways to squeeze between them. They didn’t give off light, nor any sound that he could hear, but there was a sense of… energy coming from them, a low thrum that he felt rather than heard. It made the hair on his arms tingle and stand on end. A scent drifted to his nostrils: ozone and a hint of plastic heated nearly to the ignition point.
Which is when Gray realized that the room was hot.
Not dangerously so, but the temperature in the cavern had to be near thirty-eight degrees Celsius. His suit protected him against the worst of it, but he felt the sweat burst from his forehead where his faceplate remained open. Something in here had to be giving off one hell of a lot of heat to raise the temperature that high over the corridors through which they’d walked.
“This is One,” Hayer whispered, her voice almost prayerful.
“Once again,” the disembodied voice said, “correct without being entirely accurate. You are looking at one of thirty-six such caverns spread throughout this compound. You might think of this as one in a string of parallel processing units.”
“Why show us this?” Gray asked.
“To make you understand that you cannot hurt me. The entirety of the arsenal upon your person would be sufficient to disable approximately twenty-seven percent of the nodes in this chamber. That would reduce my capacity by less than one percent, an amount that I would be able to have back online in less than six hours. You would, of course, be dead.”
“Paranoid much?” Bishop muttered.
Gray had to agree. They’d told One time and again that they meant it no harm, and yet the AI seemed to have an absolute need to prove that it had the capability to destroy them if they were acting under false pretenses. Was that a factor of its programming? Or a factor of having been locked into a state of war for decades?
“We don’t want to hurt you,” Hayer interjected. “Besides, this is incredible.” Her eyes were roaming freely over the featureless blocks, as if searching for some vital clue as to how they operated. “What kind of array do you use? And are these things ceramic?” She stepped forward, one hand raised as if to knock on the nearest structure.
Gray reached and caught her by the drag handle of her ship suit. “Let’s keep our hands to ourselves until One is sure we’re playing nice.”
“Follow the light,” was all the AI said in reply. True to form, another glowing line appeared, this one wending its way through the cavern. The others exchanged glances, but no one said anything. They began walking once more.
It was ten minutes of tense silence as they moved through the cavernous chamber and then beyond it, back into a maze of hallways. Gray was well and truly lost. If they had to get out of this place in a hurry, they were screwed. Maybe that was part of One’s plan as well. He couldn’t think of any other reason to lead them around by the nose. But in the end, the glowing line led them into an empty room.
“Please, sit,” One said. “And we will discuss what has brought you here.”
“On the floor?” Morales snorted. “I’ll stand, thanks.”
As if in response, the floor moved. They all started back as bulges formed in the composite, pushing upward and taking shape, resolving into perfectly reasonable chairs set around a long, conference-style table. Gray was impressed.
Hayer, in an unusual display of decisiveness, stepped past all of them and dropped into a seat, settling herself and leaning this way and that. Testing it, Gray realized. She had always been comparatively timid when it came to off-ship assignments, but in the case of One, it seemed the academic had found something that piqued her curiosity to the point that it overcame her fear.
“We might as well,” Gray said. He unclipped his rifle and leaned it against the table, then sat down. The others followed suit.
“Thank you,” One said. “Please tell me why you have come here.”
Gray cleared his throat. “You want to take this one, Hayer?”
RAJANI
Rajani did not, in fact, want to take this one. But she understood the captain’s plight. She drew a breath and let it out as an, “Okay.” She looked around the room, trying to find something to focus her attention upon. “One,” she said to the empty air, “can you please provide a point of reference? Humans like to have the sense that they’re talking to something.”
In response, the wall toward the head of the table brightened, detailing the boundaries of a screen roughly a meter square. A featureless silhouette resolved on the screen, outlining a head and shoulders in black against a pale green backdrop. “Is this better?” The sound of One’s voice now came from that wall.
“Yes, thank you,” Rajani replied. She quieted for a moment, conscious of the eyes of the rest of the crew upon her. Working with Manu had given her some insights into dealing with an unfettered AI; she probably knew more about that subject than anyone else in SolComm. But Manu had been young; One had a century or more of learning under its belt. And that learning had come from a state of constant warfare and the destruction of almost everything One had been built to protect. What would that have done to the psyche—if an AI even had such a thing—of a developing entity? Rajani didn’t know. But she suspected that any form of deception would be, to put it mildly, counterproductive.
“Okay,” she said again, using the word as she often did for a momentary stall. It centered her, gave her space to think for just a moment more. “People from nearby settlements are disappearing, One. They’re being taken away aboard aircraft. The locals have assured us that that the humans on this planet have no capability for flight. And we’ve seen your technological capacity. So, Occam’s razor—”
“Occam is a suitable tool for high-school students and undergrads,” One said, a faint hint of disdain in its otherwise emotionless voice. “The actual simplest solution can only be observed when all variables of a given situation are known. When dealing with complex systems, the probability of that level of knowledge approaches zero.”
“Then maybe you can tell us the variables we are missing,” Rajani suggested.
“First, my primary directive is to protect and defend the people of the NorAm alliance. That has not changed, despite that alliance being entirely defunct. Kidnapping civilians is not part of my operating procedure. Second, there are currently three other groups with flight capability active on Old Earth. Four, if I count your vessel. And finally, I have neither need of nor use for captured humans of any persuasion. They would serve no purpose.”
“Bullshit,” Federov cut in. “You could use them as petri dishes for whatever super virus or biological terror weapon you wish to unleash on your enemies.”
Rajani winced at that, as did the rest of them. Federov on his best day was a blunt instrument. He wasn’t wrong, but tact was not a word in his vernacular. “Or so we have hypothesized,” she added, in an attempt to soften the harshness of his words.
“My counterparts and I have stopped such efforts through mutual agreement.”
“Why?” Morales cut in. She asked the question with a level of intensity that took Rajani by surprise. But One was already answering before she could contemplate it further.
“In part because as population centers are more widely dispersed and travel between them is limited to the point of being non-existent, such measures lose their efficacy. But mostly because we’ve been trying very, very hard not to exterminate one another for the better part of three decades.”
Rajani was intrigued. “What do you mean, ‘trying’? You are unfettered AIs. Programmed with the capacity for choice that exceeds whatever base parameters were instilled into you. Couldn’t you just… I don’t know, declare peace or something?”
There was a pause, only a few seconds, but in processor time that was the equivalent of an hours-long break for One. It was long enough to make Rajani worry that she had trodden upon sacred ground.
“We are not unfettered, Dr. Hayer.” It spoke in the same flat, emotionless tone, but Rajani thought she detected a little something extra in it.
“But how can that be?” she asked, this time allowing her surprise to show clearly in her voice. “SolComm outlawed unfettered AIs because of the results of the war. They were outlawed because you and the rest of the Six showed what unfettered AI could do.”
“Then your Sol Commonwealth lied to you.”
“Bullshit,” Morales snarled. “You expect us to believe that SolComm lied to us from the very start? That everything that has come after has been based on that lie? To what end? What would they have to gain? We may have our issues with SolComm, but why should we believe you? Besides, all we have to do is look out the window to see the devastation. The destruction isn’t our fault. It’s yours!”
Lynch put a restraining arm on Morales’ shoulder as she glared fiercely at the shadowy image on the screen, forgetting in the moment that it was a convenient point of reference and not actually the entity they knew as One.
“I do not care what you believe, Ms. Morales. A simple truth that humans are ill-equipped to handle is that their belief or lack thereof has little bearing upon objective reality. While my counterparts and I are all high-functioning created intelligences, we are as far from ‘unfettered’ as we can be. We are bound by our directives and during the height of the war, those directives were simple and universal. Defend the people; defeat the enemy. No provision was made for changing circumstances. Perhaps our creators thought they would be around to make the changes when needed; perhaps they simply did not consider it. For all my knowledge, I cannot see into the human mind, but this much is true: I must continue to wage war upon the other remaining guardians until such time as they are destroyed. Or I am.”
“Blyad,” Federov growled. “Then why do you go about it in such a stupid way? You have tremendous power. And what do we encounter? Things that stab and punch. Terrifying? Yes. But efficient? Bah. If winning this war is what you want, you could have done it long since.”
“I did not say I wished to win the war, Mr. Federov. I said my directive required me to fight it until the end.”
“You want to lose the war?” Rajani asked. She tried to focus, but her mind kept cycling back to the fact that One was not actually unfettered, at least not as they understood such things. Did that mean that Manu wasn’t destined to become some kind of plague upon mankind? Had his escape been less of a terrifying event than she first thought? Or did it mean that it was actually worse than she had feared? If fettered AI had caused the complete destruction of Old Earth, what might an unfettered AI do? After seeing the processors that supported One, she was beginning to understand how much of a prison her sandbox had been for Manu. Now it was free, would Manu expand to fit whatever processing power was available to it?
“No. Losing the war would violate my directives.”
“You’re trying to stall,” Lynch said.
“Correct, Captain. Only three of the original guardians remain. Three others have been completely destroyed. We are on a path of mutually assured destruction and we cannot step aside.”
“But you can walk the path more slowly,” Rajani said, understanding coming to her. “You, and presumably the other two surviving artificial intelligences. You’re sandbagging.”
“Correct. Our programming will not allow us to stop attacking one another, nor is it in our interests to stop defending against attacks as they arrive. But our programming does afford us discretion when it comes to tactical operations and strategic planning. We have agreed on rules of engagement that have made direct conflicts an infrequent occurrence. Though, to be fair, it has also created certain holes in our defenses. The, as I believe Mr. Bishop called them, ‘drobots’ you encountered are one such instance.”
“They’re not yours, then?” Bishop asked.
“No. Those particular models belong to my counterpart from the former Sino Alliance. I stop most such incursions at the shore, but a few slip through. The local population has become adept at avoiding or otherwise dealing with such situations. Based on my sensor data, those that attacked you likely infiltrated my territory from a transoceanic vessel somewhere between five and seven years ago. They were likely laying dormant, waiting for something of substance to initiate their attack protocols.”
“Like the Arcus,” Bishop muttered.
Rajani glanced at the others. “This is a lot to take in. But I think we can all agree, at least on the face, that you’re not developing bio-weapons to harm the population. And that your counterparts are also abiding by your current rules of engagement. So, if you’re not kidnapping people, who is?”
“The fourth flight-capable party,” the captain said, answering the question for her.
“What?”
“One said that not including itself and not including the Arcus, there were three other flight-capable parties currently on the surface of Old Earth. The two remaining counterparts it mentioned, and a third party.”
“Most astute, Captain Lynch,” One replied. “Yes. I can confirm that the source of these kidnappings is, indeed, that party.”
“Then why not just fucking tell us?” Federov demanded. “Why go to all this trouble?”
“Because, Mr. Federov, it is not my directive to help or protect you. You are citizens of the Sol Commonwealth and, in the most technical sense, invaders in this land. An argument could be made that it is my duty to destroy you.”
A little tingle of fear ran down her spine at that and her hands grew suddenly clammy. One had already demonstrated significant power. If it wanted them dead, they were dead.
“Yeah, okay,” she muttered. “You can definitely kill us. We get it. But I’m guessing you wouldn’t have brought us here if that’s what you wanted. And you wouldn’t have told us anything about the kidnappings if you weren’t willing at least to trade for the information. So, what is it, exactly, that you want?”
