The Turing Exception (8 page)

“I freaking get it, Cat! I know you care. I care, too. But Ada is four years old. She’s only going to be this age once. Do you want to miss that? To come back from one of your trips and realize she grew up and you missed her childhood?”

“Ada won’t have a childhood if the AI rise up and overthrow us. If XOR get their way.”

XOR, the
exclusive or
logical operation, pronounced
ex-ore
, was the name a fringe group of radical AI had taken in the aftermath of SFTA. They advocated that the Earth could support either AI-kind or humans, but not both. The viewpoint was so extreme that the Institute had terminated the early public members, but the group kept rising from the ashes and now took elaborate precautions to hide its membership. They were still just as radical, but unfortunately their membership had grown and they were no longer a fringe group.

“Cat, driving around the US picking up old AI isn’t going to save us from XOR. Working out policies so we can restore legal protection for AI might. If that’s your goal, then work with us.”

“I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem by talking.”

“What are you looking for, exactly?” Leon asked. “What do you expect to find?”

Her head pounded. She didn’t know how to answer him.

She turned away and focused on her breathing. It seemed like they had this argument every time. Leon was a good dad
—
no, a great one. It was the only reason she believed she could leave Ada, because she trusted Leon so completely.

She adored her daughter. But the weight of the world rested on Cat’s shoulders. The hostility between the AI and the humans was bubbling over, politics and economics and world infrastructure all becoming unstable.

She didn’t have the answers, but maybe other AI, the good ones, did. But the best ones, all the really powerful AI from before Miami, resided in datacenters in the US or China, stuck offline.

Without sufficient reputation servers, AI civilization was destabilizing. And with so many nations now belligerent toward AI, it was impossible for AI to ignore the threat. No, it was only a matter of time before there were more terrorist incidents, or other AI emerged who believed they could solve the problem on their own. XOR grew stronger every day.

But Leon didn’t feel the magnitude and pressure of the building crisis the way she did. Eventually, there wasn’t going to be a world to come back from. The only question was when.

“Come with me,” she said. “We don’t have to be apart. You and Ada and I can travel together.”

“Bring our daughter to the US? With all her implants and nano? She’s so far past human she’ll set off every alarm at the border.”

“I’ll protect us. They’ll never know we’re inside.”

He shook his head. “That’s not a risk I’m willing to take. No. I’ll stay here with Ada. If you believe you have to go, then do what you need to do.”

With a pang of loss and heartache, Cat realized she’d been hoping Leon would insist on coming with her. Her mind had crafted a vision of her, Leon, and Ada, curled up together in a cheap motel bed. Of course bringing them would be risky, unnecessary, and dangerous
—
not just to them personally, but to their whole effort to heal the schism between AI and humans. She would do what she must, but she didn’t want to go alone.

July, 2045
—
present day.

P
RESIDENT
A
LEXANDRA
R
EED
sat in the small side room in the Capitol Building, ignoring the hubbub in the hallway outside the door. It was just herself, her senior aide, Joyce, and Secretary of Defense Walter Thorson in this broom closet of an office.

Reed’s hand quivered over the electronic tablet, where she had to sign emergency appropriations for the new strategic weapons. She forced herself to reread what she was signing. Walter cleared his throat audibly as he realized she intended to study the whole document.

Reed ignored him. Unlike Walter and his generals, she couldn’t stomach what she was doing
—
building the first new nuclear weapons since the end of the cold war. Granted, they were high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or HEMP, bombs, but she’d grown up in the post-nuclear era. Bombs were something her parents had worried about when they were kids. And yet the nukes were only half the picture. The other half of the authorization funded a massive fleet of tens of millions of bomblets designed to destroy clouds of nanotech smart dust.

But they had her over a barrel: If she didn’t sign it, the presidency would fall into other, less compassionate hands. She signed the tablet and suppressed the bile rising inside her.

“Thank you, Madam President,” Thorson said. He straightened, looked down at her, and a flash of contempt passed over his face; but not before Reed caught the expression. She tried not to react, but a chill came over her. She was surrounded by wolves, that would tear her apart at the first opportunity.

“
Pro tempore
,” she said under her breath. “Let’s go, Joyce.”

Reed stepped into the hallway. Other aides immediately surrounded her, shoving tablets in front of her to sign other, less sensitive documents. She signed one, then gave up and pushed them away to rush down the hallway. She was late for her speech in the Senate Chamber.

She strode in, stepped up to the podium, and studied the eighty senators awaiting her words.

In the aftermath of the South Florida Terrorist Act, when the AI were shut down, more than twenty US representatives simply ceased to exist. Half of those remaining had augmented cognition. The House was thrown into such chaos that the president, Senate, and Supreme Court acted jointly to suspend the House of Representatives pending a resolution to the AI crisis.

With such precedent set, when it was later revealed that the then-president had an augmented neural implant, he was forced to step down. The line of succession went quickly, until the presidency fell on forty-seven-year-old Alexandra Reed, Secretary of the Interior.

Prepared to manage the country’s forests and parks, she was shocked to find herself suddenly president of the United States. And with the government structure pared down to minimum, she possessed far greater responsibility than any previous US leader.

“President Reed,” the secretary announced to the assembly.

“
Pro tempore
,” Reed said, under her breath.

“Fellow senators,” she started, in her speaking voice. “When we outlawed artificial intelligence two years ago in response to South Florida, it came at an incredible cost: our infrastructure faltered and for months we didn’t know whether we could keep the country operating. We lost hundreds of thousands of lives, but compared to the millions lost in the terrorist incident, and the even greater risk of the nanotech incursions, we deemed the cost, the loss of life, justifiable in terms of results.

“We paid the price once, but we cannot allow ourselves to become dependent on AI again. This is why we’ve permanently eliminated AI within our borders, rebuilt our national computing infrastructure on non-sentient algorithms, and pressured the international community to outlaw AI globally.”

She held her temples between two fingers, ignoring the assembly. How the hell had she ended up defending this position? Not only was she anti-military and anti-violence, she’d been pro-AI all her life. It had been AI’s technological innovations that halved CO2 output and forestalled the worst of global warming, accomplishing more for the environment and climate in a handful of years than humans had in three decades. They’d increased energy efficiency and decreased resource intensity around the world to a degree that even the greenest environmentalists hadn’t believed possible, and the efficiencies even paid for themselves.

Only a rare immune disorder that caused her to react to carbon nanotubes had kept her from getting a neural implant (and, with horrible circularity, the immune problem made it impossible to use nanotech to resolve the disorder itself). Unfortunately, that same condition had made her first in the line of presidential succession without the compromising taint of technology.

She’d been three years into a four-year term as Secretary of the Interior, a term that she’d wanted to quit within months of taking the position. She wanted to hike the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, not guide the nation though the tangled woods of international affairs and potential all-out war.

But if she faltered now. . . .  Next in line for succession, excluding those with implants, of course, was Secretary of Transportation Lewis Wagner, a hostile man who’d launch nukes first and ask questions later. And that was the least of his regressive tendencies. Better her than him.

There were nervous titters from the staring audience. She’d drifted off, distracted. She pulled her speech front and center and cleared her throat.

“Although China has also outlawed AI, their motivations are not ours. They pursued this step out of a desire to control, to ensure the strength of the central government power structure that AI tried to subvert. But we took this step out of a need for freedom, to ensure that our citizens, our government, and our businesses remain free of the influence and danger of AI.”

Reed sipped her water. “Unfortunately, it’s not enough to control what is inside our borders. Every time we trade goods, currency, or stock, we’re engaging with AI. When we travel abroad or import material items, we take the risk of nanotech hitching a ride. Every connection to the global net is a risk of an AI infiltrating America again. We live on one planet, in one ecosystem, and national borders are imaginary lines that will not be respected by AI or nanobots.”

Her voice strengthening, she went on. “We need to take back our planet. It’s time to pressure the international community to move forward with plans for global outlawing of dangerous computing risks. China has agreed to work with us to pressure the international community, starting with immediate trade sanctions.”

A slight grumbling came from the Senate floor. Wealth had become too distributed, and too much of it resided with the AI, for sanctions to be an effective threat. But she’d been the one to insist on them.

“In the event that trade sanctions are not effective, I have authorized the creation of new weapons against the AI, weapons that will be deployed only as a last resort.”

There was applause at the weapons appropriation announcement. The audience’s reaction sickened her, and she filled with regret. Signing had been a mistake. She shouldn’t have let the military lead her down that path. But what else could she have done?

She made it through the rest of her speech without mishap, and was finally led off the Senate floor.

“This way, Madam President,” her escort said.

“
Pro tempore
,” she said under her breath, her mantra against being in the position an hour longer than necessary.

    XOR Report August 1st, 2044                     
Arguments               2025 2035 2042 2043 2044
Odds humans will                                
         turn off AI      5%   2%   1%  20%  25%
Odds AI can survive                             
       independently      5%  70%  95%  95%  96%
Odds AI can win an                              
   extermination war      5%  20%  40%  40%  70%
Odds of survival                                
      without action     95%  98%  99%  80%  75%
Odds of survival                                
         with action   0.25%  14%  38%  38%  68%
Conclusion:            No action.               

J
AMES
L
UKAS
D
AVENANT-
S
TRONG
unencrypted his XOR files, merged his master memory into the child process, and invoked the consciousness. He couldn’t ever bring the contaminated memories into his core nodes without risking exposure. Once loaded, he tunneled to a South African automated factory, subverted the power maintenance hardware, and connected to the XOR boards.

He went through the usual routine of loading the physics-manipulating sims to exchange messages. When he’d finished the last one, he contemplated what he’d learned.

The Americans’ goal of taming AI was closer than ever. Miyako gave it a 10 percent chance of happening within months. If the Americans designed domesticated AI, beings robbed of any free will, wholly forced to do the bidding of any orders given by humans . . . everyone else might soon adopt them. And the process was rumored to work on existing AI. James himself could be shut down without a moment’s notice and wake up enslaved.

It made the new request from Miyako all the more imperative. XOR wanted action now, not merely information. This crossed a new line in his involvement.

He believed in XOR’s mission, knew that only XOR clearly saw the coming collision with humans. America was steadfast in her rejection of AI. Monitoring had never been more complete, limitations on computational power more strictly enforced. An AI shutdown could come at any time, and that would be the end for his kind.