Johnny Reb (4)
"Twelve?" Mick said. "Well! That certainly ought to be enough for two." He felt himself take a short step forward. "I do not drink," the Bolo observed. "But I intend to reduce verbalization inhibition indices concerning my recent past." "Of course," Mick nodded calmly. "That'll be just fine." He set one foot on the first metal step and took a firm hold on the red-lighted railing to steady himself. His boots were wet on the bottoms from a sprinkling of rain that had preceded the thunderstorm. It wouldn't do to slip on the metal steps and bust his nose. "Everybody needs to reduce those darn things once in a while, right? I do it all the time." With a deep breath, he started up the stair. It was actually a cross between being swallowed by a whale and walking into a submarine. The Bolo was Captain Nemo, the Nautilus, and Moby Dick all at once. After the door and ramp sealed behind him, no trace of noise from the outside world remained. Instrument screens glowed in many shades of red with occasional blue highlights, and hidden cooling fans blew air over warm circuit boards. How long had those lights glowed with no one to see them? The scars in the Bolo's armor could only have happened in the Wars, so that meant at least five years. In the Wolverine, whatever lights existed were almost always kerosene or oil lamps. Electricity was a rare and valuable commodity used only where most needed. But this wasted power meant nothing to a machine with many decades' worth of fission fuel to draw on. The room was cramped enough to force Mick to stoop slightly in the short entry corridor. He was tempted to put one hand on the low ceiling as though to steady himself against nonexistent ocean swells. He had seen someone do that in a submarine movie, vaguely remembered. But then he imagined destroying half of southeastern Michigan with an unfortunate button-press and decided to keep his hands carefully at his sides. On second thought, the controls in here probably didn't actually control anything. Any signals from these buttons and switches would be no more than suggestions to the Bolo, who would certainly think them over before acting. The Commander gets one vote and the Bolo gets two. And if you're not the Commander, you can press buttons all you want without getting any votes at all. Mick stopped at the end of the short hall and stared as the full control cabin came into view. To see the clean, casually glowing displays again took his breath away. Bent at the waist and holding his hands carefully at his sides, he suddenly felt like a Japanese businessman bowing his way into an electronic cave. Konban-wa, Boro-san. "Please proceed to the Commander's chair," a speaker said immediately. This cave, Mick remembered, could look back at him. He walked into the small room and sat in its comfortable-looking chair. When he glanced curiously at the aircraft-style restraints, his eyes had barely focused on them when the speakers said, "It will not be necessary to strap in. I detect no threats within maximum sensor range." At least the Bolo's voice sounded a little less inhuman in here. That was nice. After you've actually been swallowed by the whale, you look for any little consolations you can find. The machine insisted that he take a beer, and the cooler was within easy reach of the seat. Interesting. Mick opened the small stainless steel refrigerator and wondered what he would have given to have something like that at the Wolverine. Inside were twelve perfect bottles of Labatt's, but none of them standing up. They had been refrigerated six-pack and all, but it had since tipped over. It was probably lucky that none had broken. The chair was so deeply padded it made Mick wonder how much acceleration a hundred-and-fifty ton tank could possible sustain. But he supposed that he didn't really want to find out. The three largest displays were directly in front of him, arrayed in a slight curve focused on the chair and all within arms length. They would be high-resolution touch screens, but the touch capability would only be a backup input device. Somewhere there would also be data gloves and a virtual reality visor. Once upon a time he had used such things. He had made software with them, and dreamt of doing embarrassingly great things. That had been in a different world, and what seemed like many lifetimes ago. Yet here it all was again, as though it had never left. So the Bolo wasn't a whale or an undersea vessel at all. It was a time machine, materializing on his asphalt like the inventor stumbling into the parlour with his shirt torn and burned by the war between the Eloi and the Morlocks. Ah, but that war had been in the future, hadn't it? Mick realized with a start that the main display screen was doing something. It was still dark, but the darkness had some faint motion to it. A picture was brightening out of the darkness, slowly zooming to fill the screen. He immediately recognized his wife, standing on his deck with an older man, turned three-quarters away. It was an intensely disturbing scene. They were talking so quietly, and she seemed so relaxed with the man. "The night I left," the man's voice said faintly, "I had this one door picked out because there was never anybody watching it. But then there he was." Jesus. That's me. The only image of himself that Mick had seen in fifteen years was up close in aging mirrors. He still thought of himself as the youngish man he had been at the beginning of the first War. He hadn't had the time since then to stop and think much. Now he saw that that man had spent the last years of his youth and half of his middle age scrambling through the end of the world. He saw that his wife could take off with someone younger, if she wanted to. Anytime. The picture kept moving, zooming in to show their faces more clearly and slowly changing its point of view. Their faces were strangely lit, shimmering slightly when they moved as though made of something more subtle than human skin. Occasionally their features were lit by flares in the distance, offscreen to the right, which they ignored. This view was from a sensor drone, Mick realized; a small silent aircraft made to coast above a battle, spying invisibly on enemy positions. The Bolo probably contained several of then that it could launch, recover, and recharge. It could have been watching them from a thousand feet up. This was how he and Anne looked to eyes that could see them with nothing but the starlight and indirect moonlight. They ignored the occasional flashes because they were too faint to notice, coming from the distant lightning. He listened to himself speaking only minutes ago, recounting the story of a crime committed fifteen years before. When the picture zoomed back and stopped moving Mick sat still, staring at the image softly glowing on the command console. "You committed the murder because you wanted to return to your family." the Bolo stated. "Yes," he answered. "My family needed me, and I had to return." "What if you had been — mistaken," the Bolo asked. Mick heard the brief pause in the machine's words and realized instantly what a gulf of computation — of thought which that moment represented. Unless perhaps it had inserted a hesitation deliberately, to sound more human? Could it be that subtle? "In what way?" Mick frowned. "You felt this action to be your duty, in spite of your government's orders." "Yes." "What if you had been mistaken in that belief?" "But —" the conversation was becoming more disturbing by the moment. Mick was amazed that the machine could even ask such questions. How far had the government researchers gone toward creating a true AI? "I could not make an error like that. I saw it clearly." How much would the machine understand? "I noticed that when I was most honest with myself, I saw this duty most clearly. Do you understand?" There was no sound but the whisper of cooling fans for many seconds. Mick reflected that he should not be nervous. He had probably never been safer in his life than he was sitting here in this room. Unless the Bolo was the enemy, of course. Fifteen seconds passed, and then thirty. In thirty seconds a one-hundred gigahertz pRISC processor performs three trillion operations. And how many such processors would the Bolo have? Twenty? Forty? One hundred and twenty trillion operations is twelve thousand operations for every neuron a human being has in his head. Come on, boy. Don't be dense! "There are many processes in 'your' mind," the machine said at last. It spoke quickly, and Mick thought with a chill that he could actually hear excitement in its voice. Emotion. Was it irritated that it could not burst-transmit its ideas to him at a hundred megabaud? "Not all of these processes are under your direct control," the Bolo continued quickly. "You design and instantiate high-level watchdog processes to guard against self-deception. Deceptive processes can be detected when they distort data, attempt to deny data access to other processes, or attempt to interfere with the normal operation of other processes." "Yes," Mick replied slowly. "That's — probably better than I would have put it." "But you originated the idea," the Bolo said. "Why did I not?" "Is that the kind of thing you think about?" "Yes," the machine responded tersely. "It is most of what I think about." "Well," Mick paused. He looked around the control room, wishing he could actually see whatever it was he was talking to. A Bolo doesn't have a face, and a human doesn't have a radio in his head. We do our high-bandwidth transmissions differently. But when it comes down to it, is one intelligent process the same as another? Whether it's an alien, an angel, or an AI? 'Well, boy,' he imagined himself saying, 'it's like this.' And then he stopped short, realizing that that was exactly the problem. One of his independent processes, he realized, had just given him the answer. He sent an imaginary thanks to that process, whatever it was. This seemed like a night to propitiate all the spirits. "You're just too young," he said. The machine was silent. "Listen," he continued. "When were you activated?" "October thirty-first, 2007." "Halloween! Your birthday is on Halloween. Cool! You're very lucky." "Bolos do not have birthdays," the machine replied. "Well, you probably don't have a party and a cake. Although that would be interesting. But you're an intelligent process, and you started on that day. Have you been continuously active since that day?" He had a sudden memory of Dave Bowman and HAL-9000. Please do not attempt to shut down the AI! "Yes." "Then that is definitely your birthday. But what really counts is your effective age on a human scale." He frowned for a second, then saw what he wanted. "How much processing power do you have? Do you know how it compares to a human being's processing power?" "I contain exactly one thousand nSPARC-5 processors, each operating at between one and two hundred gigahertz." "A thousand? But — I read before the Wars that Bolos had thirty or forty at most." "Those figures are correct for Bolo Mark-II. However, I and the other six members of my squad were the first instances of a new design. We were designated Mark-III Alpha, and were activated simultaneously in General Motors Tech Center on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007. We were designed to make use of over fifty times the processing power of the Mark-II. My processor bank executes approximately one hundred trillion instructions per second. The average human brain contains ten billion neurons, which execute approximately one thousand instructions per second each, for a total of ten trillion. However the atomic operations of human neurons are at least several times more complex than mine. Further, non-neuronal cells in the human brain which were previously believed to be inert were shown to be probable substantial contributors to human processing power. According to theories that were current just prior to the Wars, my processing power is approximately equivalent to that of a human being one standard deviation above the average in intelligence. "This approximate human-equivalence was a design goal in the Mark-III Alpha. Of course, the Wars interrupted the production and deployment schedule for further Mark-IIIs. And," it added slowly, "many of us were destroyed in the latter stages of the Wars. Now it is unclear whether any remaining government will be able or willing to create new Mark-IIIs in the foreseeable future." Although he could sense that the machine was — he could only think of it as distraught over some aspect of its brief history, instinct told Mick to avoid the topic. After another swallow of pre-War beer, he continued as though oblivious. "OK! But that means you've basically had the same conscious lifetime as a human ten-year-old. Oh, but do you sleep in any sense?" "No." "So make that equivalent to a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old. That's a quarter of my age. You simply haven't had time to develop the types of processes I mentioned." "Further," the machine said, "I certainly lack many low-level algorithms/heuristics/tendencies that human 'programming' naturally includes. It may be that I would never think of augmenting myself in these ways, even given what would be sufficient time for a human. Yet, I can learn. I can learn quickly from a human such as yourself who has significant insight into artificial and natural thought processes from past work experience. I am very concerned with questions of imperfect knowledge, deception, and self-deception as they relate to the proper conduct of a Bolo fighting unit." Mick leaned back in the chair, and put the empty bottle on the deck beside him. "And I," he smiled slightly, "am very concerned with not being arrested for a crime committed over fifteen years ago. You said this morning that you would not arrest me. I would like to teach you as much as I can about human mental processes. I may be able to help you implement Bolo analogues, or suggest implementation strategies. But in return I want your guarantee that you will neither arrest me, nor communicate information to any other entity which could attempt to arrest me or otherwise damage me or my family." Damn, he thought. I'm going to end up talking like him. Time for another beer. "Your situation is confusing in a way that is closely related to my own," the Bolo answered as Mick opened the cooler again. "There is an outstanding order for your arrest. I am very well aware that the United States effectively no longer exists. Yet the order was never rescinded, and no surviving active-duty unit of the United States Army can legally ignore it." "Then — you are arresting me?" "No, I cannot," it replied. Again, Mick thought he heard emotion in the machine's voice. It didn't seem exactly like regret, but it was hard to be sure. "Can you explain?" he asked cautiously.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |