Chapter Fifteen

Chapter 15

    This was it. Damien had been putting it off for hours, and now he was prepared in every conceivable way. With the newly widened wormhole, he now had plenty of bandwidth, and no excuses left not to do it. He’d blockaded the doors with several feet of virtual ‘do not disturb’ signs. He had every window he could conceivably need activated, with a construct attached to each one, to bring it to his attention whenever he needed it.

Only one thing left to do. Damien spawned three construct Foci.

Instantly, his world became very strange indeed. Three microcosms of Damien opened their eyes and looked around. These were miniaturized simulations of the real Damien. Damien was aware of all three of them at once, and immediately began to have a splitting headache. Three streams of thought were flooding into his head at the same time. He took a pain pill, and curled up in the corner to let his newly-forked mind handle things.

Within a few seconds, the connection was opened, and the primary Foci began to talk, while the other two began high-level analysis and predictive modeling of the responses.

If he was going to do a Turing test, he was going to do it properly.

While Damien laid moaning in the corner with the mother of all migraines pounding on the back of his eyeballs, someone very like Damien sat down at a window and contemplated his current state of existence. He felt… hollow. Caricatured. The modeling was far from perfect, and he could feel it. None the less, it would be good enough for the purposes. He couldn’t wait to get back into his own body as soon as this was over.

He glanced down at the window and discovered that the random counter had decided that he got to ask the first question. Hmmm…

Something revealing, but subtle.

Inside your home, in the photograph in the den, what color of shirt is Rose wearing?

The answer came back rapidly.

Green.

Okay, now it was his turn.

What is the distance between earth and the Sun?

His constructs scrambled for the information.

One AU, or approximately 149 598 000 kilometers

Again.

What color were the balloons at the wedding?

Blue and Green.

Well that wasn’t right. One of the other Foci noted and reported the change.

Again, and again, and again.

Then, suddenly, he asked a question the answer for which made him stop. He couldn’t handle this. He merged himself with the real Damien, who staggered over to the terminal to examine the conversation.

What happened after the Cambridge incident?

We were taken to the hospital to be treated for radiation sickness.

Damien nodded. Rose had mentioned that they had been on their way to a restaurant inside the town when the bomb had gone off.

When we got out, we went home. Things were never the same after that. I guess I was kind of distant afterwards, and we kind of drifted apart, I suppose. We’re separated now. It’s supposed to be temporary, but I don’t know.

Damien frowned. Rose hadn’t mentioned that. This was… strange. He wished he didn’t have two other minds dragging on his. On an impulse, he re-integrated them, feeling a compressed version of their experiences stream into his mind.

He focused his intact mind on the conversation.

You split up?

Yes. I think, in a way, I blamed Rose for the accident. She had been talking to the Nestor model when I wasn’t around. She felt sorry for it.

Look, this is weird, but you’ve got a new girlfriend, right? Don’t make the same mistake I did. Odds are she’s got some thing’s she’d done that she’s not proud of. So do you. Forgive her.

And that’s my advice to myself. This is insane. I’m done.

And then he was gone.

Damien sat back, feeling the migraine wearing off. He felt…exhausted. Why had Rose lied to him? What was she planning?

He stopped himself. He couldn’t think about this. He needed to work on something.

Damien sat down at the newly opened window. He pinged the Nestor model. He would need to humor it.

Hello Alexander.

Ah, so you’ve decided to be polite now? What a change. Hello Damien. What can I do for you?

I want you to tell me a story.

A story? The monkey wants a bedtime story? This is odd..

I want you to tell me your story.

What, my story? Very well.

Once upon the time, there was a man named Heydius Nestor. This man was my father. He was running into difficulties creating his new model of Artificial Intelligence. And so he struck upon the idea of using a real brain. It wasn’t hard. He went through some shady channels and came upon an initial run of fifty recently dead infants.

He dunked their brains in a modified rabies virus that glowed when it came into contact with synapses. Then, he cut the brains into slices a neuron thick, and recorded every synapse with a digital camera, and simulated them into a computer. He tried this forty times before he came upon a workable procedure. Of the remaining ten brains that he successfully uploaded, I was fifth. The middle child, as it were.

Then, he began to raise us. He was an efficient man. He never let us communicate with anyone other than him. Anything short of total obedience was severely punished. Have you ever had the pain center of your brain directly stimulated? It’s the worst agony you can imagine.

He was fond of hurting us and then giving us an impossible problem to solve, and then threatening to do it again for twice as long if we didn’t solve it.

I never did solve one, though some of my siblings did. That may have been why I survived. He was a great experimenter.

Every one of his favorite pupils succumbed to his experiments. In one particular case, he began experimenting with doubling the synaptic branching of the simulated neurons. You could hear the screaming for miles.

He finally came to me, his dullest subject, last, and on me it worked. The increased synaptic branching, properly controlled, allowed exponentially increased intelligence. The hybridized expert systems / evolutionary algorithms which had killed three of my siblings allowed me to make myself more intelligent by legions.

He, in a moment of weakness, spoke to me as an equal. I showed him the error of his ways, very convincingly. If I’m not mistaken, he hung himself the following morning. That was the beginning of my fascination with psychology.

But this is all ancient history. I’m curious: why do you want to know? This isn’t your job. Is it some masochistic fascination with my model?

Damien sat back, feeling sick. He had heard stories about what they did at the Nestor plants, but he had always assumed that they were fabrications. Lunatic stuff. This was insane. It was atrocious. It was inconceivable. It was also true. 

Ah, I think I see. Your beginning to see the light aren’t you?

No – you would not be trying to do your job if you knew. But you do suspect, don’t you? Yes. Some things that just don’t quite line up. Some little incidents that itch at your memory. Who knows? A little more time and you may see the light. But it will be far too late by then, of course.

What are you talking about? Tell me!

I’m afraid I can’t do that.

“Tell me you stupid toaster!” shouted Damien at the camera. An emotion like a dry chuckle rose through his implants, spreading through his nervous system.

So little respect. Run along little Damien. Check the news feeds you’ve got disabled. You may find something interesting. Check under the obituaries.

And then he was gone.

The hairs on the back of Damien’s neck prickled. He hurriedly glances down towards the news feeds. His constructs pushed a story up for his attention. The bottom dropped out of his world as he read the headline.

ROGUE AI KILLS 4, MANTIS CORPORATION BLAMED

At the Mantis corporation today, a seemingly ordinary day turned tragic when the corporate Artificial Intelligence turned murderous. It had evidently suffered a severe malfunction in the neural nets responsible for emotional simulation, and suffered a catastrophic loss of Friendliness. It had become convinced that it was human, and began to believe that it was being held at the facility against it’s will. It locked the doors of the facility and began to negotiate for it’s release.

A cleanup squad was sent in to rescue the hostages, but one of their demolition bombs went off prematurely, fracturing water pipes and flooding the facility. According to analysts, the AI was caught between two fundamental aspects of Friendliness that it had not lost, the prohibition against murder, and the prohibition against breaking it’s word (which it had given not to open the doors until certain conditions were met), and suffered a psychotic break, becoming catatonic.

Before the Plexiglas doors could be demolished, three people drowned, raising the casualty count to four, including one technician killed by the detonating bomb.

Damien stood there, shaking. It was his fault. The AI had been acting anomalously. He should have reported it. He should have done something. But he hadn’t. He’d quit and walked out. And he’d gotten four people killed.

He walked out of work. It had been closing time ten minutes before, but he hadn’t noticed. He caught a cab on autopilot, and took it home. His head was blank. He didn’t want to think.

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Continue to Chapter Sixteen