Usurper of the Sun Read online

  “I’m sorry I’m upset. They’re as smart as we are and use the same tools. I just hate that someone would try to screw over the vestiges of humanity who actually care enough to try to rebuild this godforsaken planet.”

  “Calm down, Tom,” Riggins said gently, then looked at Aki. “I’m sorry you had to see this. I’m sorry that you were here for this at all. Let’s go back to my office.”

  “Problems are as much a part of the scientific method as solutions. It was resolved quickly and did not spin out of control.”

  “This event was a first, Ms. Shiraishi,” he said, opening the door for her. Tom had his head in his hands but looked calmer.

  “Director Riggins, I am going to let you focus on the follow-up and excuse myself. I will return tomorrow around ten.” Walking down the hallway and reaching the elevator, the doors opened as soon as Aki arrived. She held her hand in the way to prevent them from closing.

  “Of course, that sounds fine.” Riggins looked relieved.

  Stepping into the elevator, Aki put her hands to her sides and bowed as the doors began to close. Dan Riggins imitated as best he could, bending awkwardly. Aki appreciated his attempt at politeness and responded with a curt Western nod and smile.

  ACT IV: MARCH 12, 2024

  THE NEXT DAY, Aki found herself in the director’s office again.

  “The perpetrator is a student. I had heard his name before,” Director Riggins said.

  “He was accessing your computer from somewhere on campus?”

  “It’s embarrassing, Aki. He connected from the computer science building.”

  “Was it a prank, or was he trying to damage your system?”

  “He claimed it was an accidental incursion generated by his artificial intelligence system, which he had quietly introduced into our network. He’s supposedly studying automata-based programming; AIs that can make internal state distinctions. Half his explanation was over our heads and half was lies, but we couldn’t identify which part was which.” Dan wasn’t wearing a tie but looked less distraught than he had yesterday.

  “Testing AI? And he needed your resources to do this?”

  “That’s what we thought. He insisted he needed the best supercomputer available. He applied for access last month. We do liaison work with the college. He was denied because our mission is to provide for Builders-relevant research only.”

  “Is he in custody?” Aki asked.

  “We held off, because we’re military and on a campus. Incarcerating him is an option, but Berkeley students like to protest. Tom was right that it’s simple to bait our people, even though we train for alertness. You’re not going to believe this, but he sprinkled a handful of thumb drives with the Golden Bears logo in the parking lot. At least three employees on the news server plugged them in and looked at pictures of somebody on the girl’s lacrosse team in a bikini, triggering a Trojan horse that stole their passwords. I would’ve thought that high security meant not having our staff hack themselves by loading his malware for him—”

  “How do I get in touch with him?”

  Riggins was confused by Aki’s request. “He’s a screwy nineteen-year-old undergrad. We can certainly make him available to you, but he can’t be useful to the work we do.”

  “Black swans. He makes me curious. I want him to tell me what he was looking for. Maybe he resents the UNSDF having a facility on his campus and maybe he wanted to show off, but I am a proponent of pulling on threads to see what we can unravel.”

  With a shrug, Riggins scribbled a name and email address onto a Post-it and handed it off to Aki. Raul Sanchez. Aki wondered where he was from. She texted the message: I would love to meet up. Name the place and I will show, making sure to send it from an authorized account so that he would know it was her…or a fake from a hacker skilled enough to be interesting, at least. With a nod and a promise to share any relevant information she uncovered, Aki left the office. She was unsure of where to go but did not need to wait. Raul responded within two minutes, saying to go to a restaurant near Soda Hall. Aki brought up a map on her PDA and walked across campus.

  It was a small, self-service cafeteria with a limited menu of sandwiches, coffee, and soft drinks. Aki got two coffees and perched on a stool near a window. Back when she had been in college, it had been all work and no play. She dressed the same then as she did now. Seeing the wild attire of Cal students, from dreadlocks to shaved heads, she thought about how her only change was that a few of her blazers were now form-fitted. Aki felt older than thirty-four.

  Raul smiled broadly when he saw her. He needed a shower and was wearing a denim jacket three sizes too big. She handed him the coffee she had known he would want. Watching him take a sip, barely keeping from spilling, she noticed that his hands were trembling.

  “Aki Shiraishi in the flesh. I knew it wasn’t a setup because they let me go. Is ‘fan’ the right word?”

  “Who knows? Being me is more about getting the work done than caring about who is watching. I need to know what you are up to.”

  Raul made a face, a grimace that led into a smirk. “I can’t believe I’ve been summoned by you.”

  Aki laughed. “Perhaps summoning you to Director Riggins’s office would have made it easier to believe?”

  “Have you noticed how when a person says something is unbelievable it’s because the person is fully aware that what they are describing is actually happening?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I try to keep that in mind because words and consciousness don’t always mesh. Words surface without regard to circumstance, jumping the rails of a conscious selection process.”

  “What do you study? Linguistics?”

  “Barely. I’m concerned with thoughts, not words. Words are clunky, inelegant.” He fidgeted restlessly. It looked like he wanted more coffee but was afraid he would spill it. Aki would have only filled his cup halfway if she had known he would be this frenetic.

  “What’s your involvement in my case? I don’t know what sort of rap they’re looking to hang on me, but…” He glanced around.

  “I stay out of decisions whenever I can. Director Riggins said they are holding off for now. I just get a sense that your motivation for cracking into the ETICC’s system might be interesting. Do you bear a grudge because they denied you access?”

  “I needed five minutes of access. No fanfare. I’m not a cracker or a hacker, I’m a user. I filled out their form three times before they even bothered to tell me no.”

  “Okay, well according to the ETICC, you, uh, used their supercomputer to analyze the internal state of your AI system. Is that correct?”

  Raul nodded. “I hear that it caused a level-eight alarm, and that it produced some huge prime numbers,” he said proudly.

  “What is an internal state?” Aki asked. “And what were you trying to analyze?”

  Raul picked up his coffee, then nodded. “Gotcha. The coolest ringologist ever wants to know what I wanted with their big bad supercomputer. How much do you know about AI?”

  “Enough to track you down and listen. Not much more.”

  “Here’s the thing.” He tapped the side of his temple twice. “Builders know more than we do. More than we think Builders know and more than we’re able to think. I bet you think you comprehend extraordinary desolation, staring at the emptiness within and projecting the void outward. You, beautiful Aki Shiraishi, have never struck me as less than haunted by what you did and saw up there.” He pointed out the window and up at the sky. “An Abnorm of level eight, and that was just to distract them while I tried to let her check her internal state.”

  “Seven, I think. What does checking internal state mean? How is it different than a core dump?”

  “Hah. A core dump is when a computer forgets something important. It records its working state because it’s going to crash. You know that computers don’t really have cores anymore, it’s just a colloquialism? The computers dump core from a fatal error and they store what they have so it’s
available for debugging or salvage. Who needs that? Data are just as pointless as words.”

  He looked down into his cup as if he were gauging the temperature of his coffee. Then he chugged what was left. “Real AI—AI like the UNSDF wants to believe can’t happen—is a cluster of neural networks. The processor and the memory are the same thing, like wetware that grew up and amputated its humanity. It’s like eliminating both biology and culture, and then seeing what’s left.”

  Raul’s neck twitched. It was either a quelled cough or a tic, then he kept speaking.

  “The whole problem is how meaning is communicated to sentient, reasoning minds. If we know a fact, it’s so important to humans that we can’t get past it. But it’s worthless. If you take away what it means to be human, you end up with no meaning at all. A neural network needs a chance to teach itself, not just mimic the twists of nerves inside people’s heads. A pulse gets put in a neuron, then jumps a synapse. Every person who is currently breathing is so weighed down by being alive and trying to communicate that they never experience a pure cogitation.”

  Raul hoisted his coffee cup. “I look into this cup, my visual cortex gets excited and tells me all about brown. It’s liquid. We’re on stools. At the campus cafeteria. Eventually it all makes sense and I’m here now with you. You’re Aki Shiraishi, protector of the people, defender of the world. Guess what? Builders think every attempt at making sense out of signs and what signs signify is wasted energy, time, or breath. The cells in our heads are full of indecipherable symbols and we think that’s great. What’s brown? It’s a random sound that got delineated on the color wheel. You take that to the bush in Australia and all you’ve got is a funny sound that makes people laugh. Take it to the Builders and they figure we’re worth bringing to an end.”

  “Raul. Point blank? I can see why meaning is not your strong suit,” Aki said. “Please, a layman’s definition of internal state, not a manifesto to go along with your thesis, if you would.”

  “It’s not just a network of neural circuits and the state of its pulses. It’s connections that are free of useless attempts at comprehension and all the cultural baggage that comes with being human. You run humanity through fuzzy cluster loading and eventually there’s nothing left.”

  “Why did you need the ETICC? Couldn’t you just have tested it yourself?” Aki held back a nervous titter as Raul drank the second cup of coffee the way he had the first.

  “I’ll get more in a sec,” he said. “What the ETICC is proud to show the Builders, their glorious message, the Builders will see the way we see a cat leaving an eviscerated rat on the porch. It’s similar to the experience of attempting to interact with my AI. Free of language, free of words, she doesn’t have labels. I show her coffee and she gets the stimulation but none of the conceptions. You have to meet her. I’ll get you another coffee.” Raul jumped up quickly and wobbled. He led her out of the cafeteria and they started toward Soda Hall. Aki assumed they were headed to the computer science building. Then he led her past the computer science building, down an alley, and to the front door of a run-down aluminum trailer. She decided not to mention that he had not bought her a replacement coffee.

  “Sorry about the smell,” he said.

  Climbing the rickety steps and stepping inside, it was not as bad as she had feared. Cluttered, but not disgusting. The smell Raul had mentioned was chemical and reminiscent of warmed fiberglass insulation. He tossed a pile of textbooks to the floor and offered a seat on the bed. Across from her, an oversized fish tank was filled with a slightly murky liquid. A large rack of circuit boards was inside, submerged in the liquid. Cables running from each board snaked out and connected to a box outside of the tank. A few thicker wires came from that box and went to a computer on the desk.

  Several plasma monitors crowded the wall above the disk. Colors flickered erratically, as if a transcendental abstract artist was trying out new brushes. Patterns exploded into other patterns. After a moment, Aki was unsure that there were patterns at all. She was still playing along, trying to soak up all she could from Raul, even though she was reasonably certain that the strange fiberglass smell was from the process of making or consuming illicit drugs.

  “Why do you assign gender to your AI if you are so against the tyranny of meaning?” she asked.

  “It’s a reconfiguration of a Hopfield network. His first diagram always made me think of the Tree of Life.”

  Aki decided to try a different question. “How do you input commands?”

  “There aren’t any commands,” Raul said matter-of-factly. “Do you know what a wetware error is? It’s when the fatal error takes place somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. Natalia has a camera if she really needs it, and she extracts data to build her internal state. You can say hi.”

  Aki looked at the camera and spoke. “Hello, Natalia. I am Aki Shiraishi. How are you today?” She was not sure if the strange swirls of flashing patterns had changed.

  “Wow! I think she likes you.”

  “How do you know?”

  Raul laughed. “If I knew that so easily, señorita, I wouldn’t need to use the ETICC’s supercomputer.”

  “Don’t get sarcastic with me. What are all these monitors for?”

  “The internal state. The monitors produce a visual representation of the exchange of pulses and field activations. I want her to teach herself how to communicate human principles, but only with pictures, never with words.”

  “Has she ever said anything?”

  “No. That’s why I needed the ETICC supercomputer. I figured her learning would speed up if—”

  “Your monitors feed back into her camera for Natalia’s development of a dynamic internal state?”

  “It loops her field activations and a visual representation of her pulse exchanges. The monitors are in the camera’s field of view so she can think.”

  “You’re trying to break new ground in automata and cognitive development, and I like how you are trying to induce a Lacanian mirror stage. It makes sense that advanced AI would need psychoanalysis, but even a toddler has theory of mind,” Aki said, remembering the conversation with Jill from the day prior.

  “Most do. Her patterns, attempt at mirror stage or not, astonish me because I’m not sure they’re patterns. They’re there but they aren’t. She understands her internal state enough to bring up excerpts from the camera visual of her monitors and rearrange them, but she doesn’t quite seem to know that she’s talking to herself. Theory of mind might come next. She changes the angle of display to make recursive swirls sometimes. I haven’t seen that recently.”

  “How long has she been running?”

  “Four months. She’s been spacey for weeks. Her psychedelic swirls don’t seem to make sense. Monitoring internal state information is a methodology for evaluating utility preferences. It’s where biology, psychology, and cognitive science combine and allow computers to understand what they want through artificial emotions and desires. The old model was external state, where a computer would measure and answer based on the solution most apparent from the available data. It worked flawlessly for chess, evaluating the pieces and the board, but external assessments don’t tell a computer what it wants.”

  “Maybe she is bored of having too little to play with, shut up in here.”

  “No, she’s wired. She watches TV and even has net access, though filtered. We can’t have Natalia suddenly perceive the outside world and immediately start shopping online, after all. I keep hoping she’ll make a sudden leap, like showing me pictures of new parts she wants. To understand Builders, we need to understand their long-term associations, the recollections of species memory that tie them together, no matter how different the long-term associations are.

  “Homeostasis, cognitive architecture that models complex emotions, even adding the ability to fine-tune internal drives are all part of it. My breakthrough is that she gets to explore herself and generate affective control states. It got too complicated, from the human s
ide, to create algorithmic interpretations that weren’t beholden to human principles. The ranges were still human-based. She’s going to find herself as an integrated mix of these, and I’m betting she’ll lean toward a high-level affective system with episodic and working memory that creates preferences.” Raul smirked again, a mix of pride and wonder. Aki never smirked, but Raul Sanchez’s attitude reminded Aki of herself. He sat down on the bed next to Aki.

  “Maybe she needs a reboot.”

  Raul glanced at the swirl. “I think she’s deep in thought. There was a pattern like a Riemann surface, maybe a numerical series from advanced math. Nothing lasts long enough to make me sure it’s not being kicked across her from somewhere else. With a thousand terabytes, I can’t keep track of what she’s storing and processing. The tools of decision-making are similar to the ones for interpreting communication, at least in the architecture of my model. But I steered clear of giving her too much detail. She’s going to build it herself, with as little interference from me as possible.”

  “Now I get why you needed the supercomputer. Why didn’t you explain this on your application?”

  Raul looked at her and laughed. It was higher pitched than Aki would have expected. “The high-priority work gets first dibs. It’s stuff like meteorological models that are important right now. Projects like mine get shoved aside and don’t stand a chance.”

  “How do you justify cracking—sorry, using the system then?”

  Raul crossed his arms. His glassy gaze fell to the floor. “It’s funny. They’re similar.”

  “What are?”

  “Alien logic and AI—they both sit there, watching us, never saying a word. When they finally do communicate, it will be clear because there will be no burbles and no interference.”

  Aki stared at the tank. The insulating coolant bubbled and flowed, keeping the hardware from overheating. Surreal images wriggled on the monitors, then went away.