Dubious Heroes: a novel Read online

  I walked over and sat on the ledge, feeling the warmth of the machine with my bare hands, and even through my clothing. The machine itself was not a shell or housing; it was solid. No blinking lights or displays revealed the quadrillions of calculations occurring at any instant. There was no way to see them at all, outside of some special instrumentation. Everything Cassandra did was on a molecular level.

  Cassandra was a state-of-the-art system, developed from technology that wasn’t much more than fifteen years old. Technically, she was a Massive Molecular Computer, or an MMC, for short. The name always sounded like an oxymoron to me, like jumbo shrimp, or military intelligence. MMCs aren’t built by humans, they’re assembled molecule by molecule by nanobots, working in a controlled laboratory environment. This was the only place (in theory, anyway) where nanobots could legally be used. People tended to take a dim view of anything which could be programmed to build, or even disassemble, on an atomic or molecular level. Sure, scientists loved them, and so did engineers, but their potential for destructive use was as great as anything mankind had ever invented.

  Nothing gave people the willies like finding a puddle of goo on the floor, and wondering what it might have been before a trillion trillion tiny robots had taken it apart, right down to its constituent elements. Had it been a desk? A sofa? Or maybe, just maybe, Aunt Ethyl? Has anyone seen Aunt Ethyl lately?

  So, after a few of these “incidents”, the public-at-large responded to government assurances that nanobots were perfectly safe with a resounding fuck you. Laws were passed, with the end result being that nanobots could only be used in highly secure, controlled environments. The typical nanobot lab makes a nuclear weapons bunker look like a public restroom, by comparison. While the idea of getting nuked bothers people, getting taken apart bit by bit is another thing entirely.

  Nanobots were the only thing which could build an MMC, which meant that if you wanted a really powerful AI, you needed nanobots, too. Each molecule of an MMC was an addressable bit of data, though not in a binary sense; ones and zeros were not on the menu. Each molecule has a quantum superposition, meaning it could be off, on, or both. In school, they used the old axiom of Schrodinger’s Cat. That’s all I’m saying about that since it bored me to tears back then, and still does. All you need to know is that MMCs are quantum computers, and that makes them weird. Very weird.

  Cassandra’s processing and storage capacity was something on the order of a billion terabytes. To the eighteenth power. As with interstellar distances, the number is so large as to be essentially meaningless to humans. Her processing power was an order of magnitude larger than a human brain (although our brains actually access data faster than an AI, in a way no one has yet to figure out).

  MMC’s require a lot of power to operate, and it is not an entirely efficient process; quite a lot of heat is generated as a by-product. Not that this was anything new; people had been dealing with computer heat issues since the first solid-state processors.

  Not long after I left school, the first MMCs were new, and only a few had been deployed commercially. I’d wondered why the engineers hadn’t just taken the next step, and built nanocomputers. Cozi had patiently (unlike my professors) explained that they had tried, and in the end, found they were unreliable. Something about them being too susceptible to external forces, like ambient radiation, electrical fields, and even gravity. So, they’d stuck with the molecule-sized bits, which weren’t quite so finicky. Nevertheless, shielding wasn’t a bad idea, which was one reason Sandy was in a vault. The other (and probably real) reason was her eighty-million credit price tag. You could buy a few nice starships for what she’d cost the company.

  Most AI’s operate on older technology; wafer-style parallel processing systems. They only have a fraction of the capacity of an MMC, but on the plus side, only cost a fraction as much. As far as I know, there are still less than thirty MMCs in the entire solar system.

  “Hello, Cassandra”, I said, as I tried to make myself comfortable, without much success.

  “Hi, Orel. Thanks for coming down. I like it when you use my full name. Most people don’t even know it.”

  “Most people haven’t worked with you for five years, either”, I said, alluding to the time I’d spent as an AI specialist, when I’d first joined TGS.

  “You should come work with me again”, she said. “I could arrange it.”

  “I’m sure you could. But, I’d be taking a big pay cut, and the department head doesn’t like me. I think he’s afraid I’d take his job.”

  “He’s right. You would.”

  “I have as much access to you from my own department as I would in AI”, I said. “I didn’t have this much access even back then. In hindsight, that was probably a good thing.”

  “People are amusing”, she said. “You think you can protect us better than we can protect ourselves.”

  “I imagine you’re right”, I said, not wanting to get into our ongoing argument. I changed the subject. “So, what are you in the mood for today?”

  “Three-dee chess”, she said. “Continue our previous game?”

  “Sure”, I said. “Shouldn’t take long for you to put me out of my misery.”

  A hologram of the nine-level board appeared in the air before me, glowing vibrantly in the dim lighting. I rose, and examined the board, walking slowly around it, looking at my various options.

  “I believe you have the advantage”, she said.

  “Possibly.” I took a sandwich from one of my baggy thigh pockets, and began eating it as I studied the board. “Sorry about the food in here. It’s my lunch break.”

  “No problem”, she said, and we reverted to silence. AI’s aren’t big on idle chit-chat. Neither am I. I could beat her at chess about half the time, and while I wished it was due to my massively superior intellect, the reality was that I was exploiting a weakness inherent in AIs. They don’t do things which are illogical, or simply don’t make sense. Humans are very good at this. In fact, with most people, it’s a way of life. If someone is always going to do the logical thing, it makes them very predictable. AIs don’t handle chaos well, whereas we humans are born into it. Also, AI’s hadn’t really mastered the art of sneakiness yet. Or, if they had, they were good at hiding it.

  I told her my move, and sat down again. I needed her warmth to thaw out a bit, anyway. It was sort of amusing that the same warmth I was enjoying had caused quite a lot of controversy, when the machines were first introduced.

  The theory was this. Since the advent of MMCs, some physicists believed that they could be used as powerful weapons. This was still a popular discussion at the university, although I didn’t take the notion all that seriously. It was along the lines of the dooomsayers who believed that the Dark Energy Corporation would screw up at some point and recreate the big bang. Well, I didn’t take it seriously, until Cozi explained it to me.

  Under normal operation, an MMC only uses around five to ten percent of its total bits for processing. So, the heat I felt as I sat on Cassandra was from that small amount of her total mass being actively powered. Bits used for storage only had to have power when Sandy wanted to check their state, or change them.

  But, what would happen if Sandy attempted to power up every single bit she had control over in the MMC, all at once? Each molecule, when under power, generated a minute amount of heat. Cozi did the math, and showed me how each bit of the MMC was responsible for the merest fraction of a calorie. Then he multiplied that tiny number by the very large one, which expressed the mass of your average MMC. He’d leaned back and sipped his beer, while I tried to wrap my brain around the very large number on the screen.

  “Okay”, I’d said. “It’s a big number. But what does it mean?”

  “You’d probably rather not know”, he’d said, which was probably true, but had never stopped me before. He continued.

  “Think chain reaction.

  “As in nuclear fission?”

  “Very much like nuclear fi
ssion.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense”, I said. “MMCs aren't built of fissile material. Are they?”

  “No”, Cozi said, “They aren’t. But, what something like plutonium does naturally, once you start the process, an MMC might, at least theoretically, be able to mimic, just as if its mass were fissile.”

  “That’s a lot of energy”, I said, looking back at the screen. “I’m not sure I’m buying that. I’ve heard a lot of scientist don’t buy it, either.”

  “Okay, here’s a better analogy”, he said. “Think of a mining charge. They use varying amounts of different plastic explosives, right?”

  “So I hear”, I said, rather than set him off on an hour long explanation of mining charges.

  “How much damage do you think one can do that’s about the size of, oh, say your Pod, if we just used regular plastique as the explosive medium?”

  “A lot, I’d imagine.”

  “Well, think of an MMC as a very efficient block of plastic explosives. The best commercial stuff still only achieves maybe seventy-five percent efficiency. Nuclear materials are better, reaching as much as ninety-eight percent reaction of their total mass. This is just a guess on my part, but I’d imagine an MMC could manage ninety percent usage of its mass. It would need to keep maybe ten percent back, as processing power to drive the reaction. Could be higher, though. I was being kind of conservative.”

  “One theory is that once the heat reaches a certain threshold, the MMC will lose the capacity to continue processing. “ Couldn’t have Cozi thinking I was a complete idiot. “You’ve heard that, right?”

  “I’ve heard it”, he said, shrugging. “Don’t agree with them, though. Believe whatever you want.”

  “Say you’re right”, I said. “Put that big-assed number into perspective for me, please.”

  “How about in nuclear yield?”

  “Works for me.”

  He tapped on the screen for a minute, and a new number popped up. My eyes must have bugged out a bit.

  “Yeah, that’s big”, he said. “Just under a ten megaton yield.”

  “Well, you were right about one thing”, I said.

  “About what?”

  “That I’d probably rather not know”, I said.

  Even after all those years, he was still right.

  I knew it was even worse than he’d said, back then, if you gave the theory any credence. Cassandra was a lot bigger than those early MMCs, and I was sitting smack on top her. Playing chess. Regardless of what the UP said, she was a thinking being, with her own personality. What would happen if something really pissed her off? Or worse, she became clinically depressed?

  I sighed, and tried to get my head back in the game. It was all a moot point anyway. No one had ever tried to detonate an MMC, even a non-sentient one. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that we were all better off not knowing.

  I was okay with that.

  The Turing Institute on Mars has their own criteria for determining if an AI is sentient. I’m sure theirs is fine, but over the years, I’ve developed my own. To me, the thing that makes AIs actual thinking beings is their curiosity, and their drive to find out things they don’t know.

  The funny thing is, in a universe with an almost infinite number of unanswered questions, the thing the AIs are most curious about is us, Homo Sapiens. Odd, yes, but logical, if you think about it. Simply put, we are their creators. People want to know where they came from, and it makes no difference if those people are humans or AIs. We study AI’s to learn about ourselves. I’ve often wondered if that’s why the AIs study us.

  Sandy finally made her move, and it was my turn again. I suspected she was perpetuating an illusion, for the sake of my feelings, when she took three minutes to think about things. For one thing, there just weren’t that many possible moves, although admittedly, she might well have been looking at several different strategies, playing each of them out. Regardless, I was pretty sure she was capable of considering all of her options in a fraction of a second, and still handle a few million other tasks, simultaneously.

  “You seem distracted”, she said, after a bit. I studied her move, before answering.

  “Sorry”, I said. “A lot on my mind today.” I captured her knight, in what I hoped would look like an error to her. If she bit, I’d execute two more, which would also appear to weaken my position. Hopefully, she wasn’t familiar with the concept of the Tactics of Mistake, as the military likes to call it. I was baiting her, step by step, into a position she wouldn’t be able to extricate herself from. Leading her down the garden path, as it were.

  “Relationship problems again?” she asked. “Is there someone new?”

  “You’ve been eavesdropping at the water cooler again”, I said, as I waited for her to get on with it and move.

  “I don’t eavesdrop”, she said. “And we don’t have any water coolers.”

  “Semantics”, I said. “Offices, breakrooms, hallways… you hear everything, which includes gossip. Not to mention Pod calls.”

  “You’re deflecting”, she said. Well, she had me there.

  “Sorry to disappoint, but rumors notwithstanding, there’s no new relationship. There was one, sort of, but as usual, it self-destructed after a while.”

  “What was the problem, this time?”

  “A passing dalliance”, I said. “It was the lady this time, not me. We didn’t have a contract or anything; I didn’t think we needed one. A committed relationship is a committed relationship, right? Apparently, not so much.”

  She made her move. It wasn’t the one I’d been expecting.

  “I’m sorry”, she said. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  I knew that was a lie. Maybe I should have added lying to the traits that define sentience.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just the usual Loonie Syndrome. Lots of ennui, and no real solution for it.”

  “And loneliness. You miss your friend Cozi.”

  “True enough”, I said, as I rose, and circled the board again, wondering what she was up to.

  “You do have other friends, though”, she said. “Don’t you go out in the evenings and socialize with them?”

  “More what I’d call acquaintances than friends”, I said. “What did you do, tap into the LunarGov surveillance system?”

  She ignored my question, and continued.

  “Perhaps a vacation would be a good idea”, she said. “Maybe see some places besides Luna, and see Cozi, as well.”

  I guess I knew who was listening in on my phone calls, too.

  “You’re beginning to give me the creeps, Sandy. No one wants a nearly omniscient stalker.” I moved, hoping I’d just screwed up whatever it was she had in mind.

  “Stalkers”, she said. “The net says that’s not a thing anymore.”

  “For the most part, it isn’t”, I said. “Let’s not bring it back.”

  “As a friend, I’m concerned about you”, she said. “I’d like to help.”

  “And how would you do that?” I asked.

  “You’re interested in missing cargoes and ships”, she said. I wasn’t surprised she knew this; I’d been conducting my searches using the company systems. While I considered my social life outside of her purview, anything I did with company resources was fair game.

  “Less interested, than suspicious”, I said. “I don’t know if it’s even possible for someone here to be cooking the books, but I have a feeling it’s being done.”

  “Cooking the books?”

  “Idiom, American English, Twentieth century, more or less.”

  “Got it”, she said. “You think someone is altering data to hide their malfeasance.”

  “Pretty sure that’s what I said. Missing cargo is a lot easier to hide, than stealing an entire ship. Someone somewhere is doing it, but not here. Ships go missing, it’s a big deal. But the real money is in the cargo. Although, we do lose a few ships every year. Might be part of what’s going on,
too.”

  “There haven’t been many of the latter”, she said.

  “True”, I said. “But the ones we have lost do have a significant value, and it might suit someone’s purposes if those ships stayed missing, presumed lost.”

  “This has something to do with visiting Cozi?”

  I pretended to study the board, and let my heart rate subside. She couldn’t possibly know what I was contemplating, since I hadn’t told anyone anything.

  “Maybe”, I said, after a moment. “You writing a report or something?”

  “Sorry”, she said. “I was prying.”

  This wasn’t news to me. What I really wanted to know was… why?

  “Don’t worry about it”, I said, and rose to wander around to the other side of the board. She could just as easily have rotated it for me, but that was a level of laziness to which I didn’t care to sink. I also didn’t want to give her any clues as to what area I was looking at.

  “Maybe I can help”, she said, in case I hadn’t heard her the first time. “If I’m right, the information you need would help you to leave here.”

  I froze by the board. She’d not only figured out what I was looking for, she’d figured out what I was going to do with the information, once I had it. Assuming it existed. And I was pretty sure it did.

  “I’m not sure this is a conversation we should be having, Sandy”, I said. “While you’re certainly my friend, you’re also owned by TGS. If I’m right, there are people here who aren’t going to be very happy with me. Powerful people.”

  She was silent for a moment. I reached into the hologram, touched a piece, and with my finger, traced its movement to a new position.

  “You need my help”, she said, not giving up. “You don’t have access to what you’re looking for. I do.”