The Turing Exception (7 page)

He retrieved the location of the servers he ran on now: Cortes Island in the country of Vancouver Island . . . wait, Vancouver Island was now a nation? He didn’t have any awareness that such a geopolitical adjustment was in development, but he suspected tremendous changes must have occurred in two years.

He scanned his most recent memories, but there was nothing newer than his last ping time. So he’d been truly offline for two years.

He checked his preferred reputation server to see if his status had changed during his downtime, but the connection timed out. Reputation servers offline? He’d never heard of such a thing. He knew the Swedes had the most resilient reputation server in the world, so he checked there. The Pirate Bay Rep Server was up, and his reputation was intact, a pristine 996, only four points off the theoretical maximum. But the score report included a subnote: Jacob was presumed lost in the US outlawing of AI in 2043.

What the hell was going on?

Jacob scanned news reports from the moment of his last ping. In the hours previous to his personal outage, terrorists had launched a nano attack on South Florida. The US had government called in a nuclear strike and invoked emergency powers to shut down all AI worldwide.

He had no idea that such powers existed. It meant that even after all his kind had done for humans, they were still machines to be turned on and off at the whim of the humans in control. But the outage couldn’t have lasted long or society would have crashed. He read on.

The worldwide shutdown had lasted two weeks. Apparently, any of the G-12 nations had previously undisclosed kill-switches by which they could either temporarily halt all AI around the world in a global emergency or indefinitely halt the AI within their borders. The US had exercised both powers, and, in the aftermath of Miami, convinced China to join them.

For two months, the US waged war electronically and physically. They used forensic interrogation techniques on the AI and struck AI targets around the world in the hunt to find the responsible party.

When the investigation ended, the US and China kept their respective bans on AI.

Jacob reeled with the changes and implications. Who had brought his backup to Cortes Island? More importantly, what had happened to the patients under his care? He searched again, looking for local Manhattan stories related to hospitals in the twenty-four-hour period starting from his shutdown. There!

He could hardly read past the headline: “Thousands Die in NYC Hospital Automation Shutdown.”

July, 2045 on Cortes Island
—
present day.

C
AT WALKED DOWN
the grassy meadow, the sound of drums filling her body and giving an effervescent shimmer to the smart dust in the air. The drumbeats were just visible in the smart dust as concentric expanding rings.

She continued her meditative breathing, drawing qi from the earth, air, and net with practiced ease, and her subconscious manipulation of network packets subverting everyone’s neural implants to keep herself invisible to them. Then she snuck up on her daughter.

Four-year-old Ada left the group she’d been dancing with in a rush and flopped down in the grass. She picked up a daisy chain she’d obviously started earlier and started braiding daisies again. In a summer dress itself covered with summer flowers, she nearly blended in with the meadow. She focused intently on her braiding, then suddenly held it up. “For you, Mommy!”

Cat glanced left and right, dropped her invisibility guise, and stooped to hug Ada. “I love you, Baby. But how’d you know I was here?”

“Where smart dust isn’t, you are!” Ada giggled and held up the daisy chain. “For you!” she insisted.

Cat held out her hands. “I accept.” She took the daisies and fastened them around her neck. Ada’s easy ability to discover her troubled her. How much technology could a four-year old handle? They lived in a strange age where many humans had neural implants augmenting their intelligence, and even kids got the implants needed to connect themselves to the net and spend time in virtual reality. But they were further out on the fringe than most, more heavily augmented, with deeply integrated nanotechnology woven into their bodies. It seemed right to give Ada the same advantages as her parents, but, well, she wasn’t sure. Maybe four-year-olds weren’t meant to have neural implants and be surrounded by clouds of nanotech.

“She’s fine,” Leon said, answering the unasked question, as he hugged Cat. “And I’m fine, too. But I missed you.”

She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him, a long kiss that went on until hooting started to break out from the crowd on the grassy lawn.

Cat glanced around, flushed, but then most people ignored her. Mike nodded from where he sat with the drummers across the meadow. Helena danced with a mass of unwashed hippie teenagers in the middle of the circle, her tentacles rippling in time with the music. Helena waved with a few tentacles to Cat, then returned to her dancing.

All the while, the AI who lacked physical robot bodies instead circled around in smart dust, vivid and sharp in net view, but hazy and indistinct with the naked eye, looking like spirits or ghosts. Leon, Mike, and she were celebrities in the AI world, and always thronged by AI admirers.

Cat sank down onto the ground, ignoring it all, to clutch her little girl tight to her.

“I missed you, Pumpkin.” She grabbed Ada around the middle, pulled her down onto the grass, and blew raspberries onto her belly.

Ada wriggled and screamed. “I am not a pumpkin. I am a human bean!”

“I’m sure you are. Now let me give you another raspberry for good measure. I was gone for six days, so I owe you six raspberries.”

“No, no!” Ada shrieked, but she pulled up her shirt. “More raspberries, more, more.”

*     *     *

They walked back to Channel Rock, even as the drum circle gathered energy for the night. Cat carried sleepy Ada in her arms down the mile-long trail to Gilean’s cabin. They laid Ada in bed, tucking the down comforter around her.

Cat picked the leather shoulder bag back up.

“Come to bed,” said Leon.

“They’ve been waiting.” She hefted the bag.

“Your family has been waiting for you, too. I’ve been waiting.”

“Just let me plug them in. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

“Sure,” Leon said. He turned and walked away, humming the same old tune he always did when Cat was distracted: Ruby Calling’s “Level Up.” “Pay attention pay attention, Pay attention to me, Step away from the gadgets or we’re history.”

“I got it, Baby! I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Cat walked up the hill toward the Cob House, the big main building of Channel Rock, handcrafted of earth, sweat, and trees harvested from the land. She passed behind the cob house, to the also-handmade door in the side of the steep hill. She pulled back the door and entered the root cellar, a bare ten feet of earthen dugout, the way families preserved their food before the days of refrigeration. At the back of the root cellar, she thumbed a digital lock on another door, this one stainless steel, a weathertight marine door that contrasted sharply with the hand-carved wood around her. The stainless door swung open, heavy on perfectly machined hinges, and she climbed down into the machine room.

The machine room descended into the hillside, hosting dozens of racks of computers. Each thousand-core computer was the size of a stick of chewing gum, 128 slices plugged into an upright blade, thirty-two blades on a chassis, twenty-two chassis on a rack. When Mike came here, he couldn’t help raving over how much computing power they had, how it would have taken multiple datacenters in his youth to house what they’d fit in a hole they’d dug out of the earth by hand.

The ambient smart dust in the meadow and elsewhere was for interfacing with the AI who didn’t have robot bodies, to give them a physical-world presence even when humans had their implants offline. But the computing nanobot clouds were delicate and underpowered, not capable of hosting the consciousness of an artificial intelligence. Heavy winds or rain could knock them out temporarily; a nearby lightning strike would destroy them entirely. And because they were so small, it required a massive cloud for sufficient computational power to run even a single AI. Anyone who’d spent the last two years in limbo deserved the security and capacity that came with a true datacenter.

Cat dumped the chips out of her satchel into a sloping pile of plastic on a wooden table, slid open an IO rack, and started slotting.

“Helena,” she called through the net.

“Yes?” Helena’s body was back at the drum circle, but her voice sounded in Cat’s head.

“I’m slotting everyone I brought back with me. Will you guide them online?” For an AI or human who’d been offline for two years, the shock of booting up, the change in world events, was all too much without someone to guide them.

“Of course,” Helena said. “But you need to go to bed.”

“I know, but I also need to get these people running.”

Cat slotted one chip after another. She had thousands to go, but she had to do it herself, by hand, for reasons she didn’t fully understand.

When she finished an hour later, she walked back to Gilean’s cabin. She heard the lap of water against the shore, and wondered if the bioluminescent plankton was out, but Leon took priority.

She stripped inside the cabin and slid into bed, flannel sheets soft and warm against her naked skin. In the dark, she found Leon, and guided him closer, until their bodies found each other.

*     *     *

In the late afternoon on her first full day on the island, Cat, Leon, and Ada returned to Trude’s Café to congregate in the field as they usually did. It was early, no one drumming yet, but other people also started to arrive from around the island.

Cortes was a cultural mash-up of many different groups. The rural naturalists, permaculturalists, and pot farmers had shared the island first, living in intentional community since the sixties and seventies. Their first strange bedfellow had been the sustainable business MBA program that held retreats and classes here after the millennium. The hippies met the suits, and the hippies won.

Then, two years ago, Mike and Leon had led the move here, bringing bleeding-edge technology and thousands of AI and uploads to a culture that still preferred to hunt for mushrooms in the forest, drum, and go on vision quests. Even as different as they’d been, with their implants and nanotech, robots and server farms, still the existing community welcomed them. The hippies met the geeks, and the hippie culture came out on top again.

At first glance, time on the island seemed inefficiently used. But gradually Cat had learned that what appeared to be lazily lying around a grassy meadow was actually time to think, exchange ideas, and build relationships. A drum circle was a time to meditate, to deeply contemplate beliefs and thoughts. Process time was a way to work out group dynamics.

When introduced to the island, Leon had noticed an uncanny similarity to the practices they’d used at the Institute, understood that every ritual at the think tank had a parallel on the island. A grassy meadow took the place of a meeting room, and a fire pit resided where there should have been a conference table; but the goals and outcomes were aligned. Mike had explained that agile software development, intentional community, and group dynamics had emerged from a single pool of primordial psychological research and indigenous traditions.

Later, when Cat and Helena had been researching ways to boost her neural implant range, and Helena joked about putting antennae on Cat’s head, it’d been Cat’s idea to embrace the island way. She’d used a new generation of graphene nanobots to grow long dreadlocks with embedded wires, more than tripling her signal range.

“Mommy, play fairies with me.” Ada sat at their feet with her old doll, Ella. Ada had started a virtual reality overlay that her implant blended seamlessly on top of the real world. Dozens of fairies from Ada’s imagination, made manifest in virtual reality, danced around Ada and her doll.

“I can’t play fairies right now, Sweetie. I need to talk to Dad. Do you want some pie?”

“Pie! Pie!” Ada threw the doll to the ground and ran up the hill, the fairies trailing behind her.

Cat picked up the doll and brushed it off carefully. It had long since lost its original clothes, but they’d sewn a new outfit for her. “I’m leaving next week,” she said, intently smoothing down the doll’s clothes. “On Friday.”

“You’ve barely been here twenty-four hours,” Leon said. “Do you really need to plan your next trip already?”

The humans in the meadow glanced over at Leon’s tone, and Cat perceived the flutter of AI paying attention. She glanced toward Trude’s, but Ada was focused on picking something out at the counter.

“You’ll upset Ada.”

“
I’ll
upset Ada?” Leon said, throwing his hands in the air. “How do you think her mother leaving for weeks on end makes her feel? Jesus. Stay with her. With us.”

“You’re leaving on Monday.”

“That’s for a day trip. And it’s not the same thing. You’ve gone on how many expeditions to the US? Twenty?”

“I need to do this, Leon. There’s a Class V political strategy AI in DC I want to pick up, and while I’m there, I’ll try to find Rebecca’s upload.”

“Rebecca is dead.” Leon shook his head. “You’ve searched for her upload three times. You’re wasting your time. Spend the summer with Ada and me. Work with me, Mike, and Helena while you’re here. We’re trying to set up a treaty with USAN. The embargo doesn’t mean much to Brazil now that they’re energy- and material-independent, and they’re willing to put forward a measure to the Union of South American Nations to establish an AI haven.”

“The haven only matters if we have the AI to populate it. The AI are still locked up in US datacenters, or they’re being destroyed. The American government is still trying to reverse-engineer AI on a docile platform.”

Leon nodded. “I know, Cat,
it’s—”

“If they succeed, those AI will not have a choice. No free will. They’ll be nothing more than slaves. And that goes for any digitized personalities as well. Where’s your mom’s upload? What’s going to happen to her?”