AIs Read online

  A.I.s

  EDITED BY

  JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead. business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A.I.S

  Copyright © 2004 by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

  Cover art by AXB Group.

  Cover design by Rila Frangie.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN: 0-441-01216-7

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-187-0

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Edition by Baen Books

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL:

  “Antibodies” by Charles Stress. Copyright © 2000 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, July 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Trojan Horse” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1984 by Michael Swanwick. First published in Omni, December 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Birth Day” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1992 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Hydrogen Wall” by Gregory Benford. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October/November 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Turing Test” by Chris Beckett. Copyright © 2002 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, October 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Dante Dreams” by Stephen Baxter. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Names of All the Spirits” by J.R. Dunn. Copyright © 2002 by Scifi.com. First published electronically on SCI Fiction, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “From the Corner of My Eye” by Alexander Glass. Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Halfjack” by Roger Zelazny. Copyright © 1979 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. First published in Omni, June 1979. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agents for that estate, the Pimlico Agency, Inc.

  “Computer Virus” by Nancy Kress. Copyright © 2001 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Preface

  We may be on the verge of an evolutionary leap of unprecedented size and effect—but it might not be us doing the leaping.

  For the first time in history, scientists may soon be able to create sentient beings who are smarter than we are. Artificial Intelligences. A.I.s. And from that point on, it will be the A.I.s who do the evolving, at a speed mere flesh-and-blood creatures could never come near matching, as smart machines design smarter machines, machines better and more efficient and more intelligent than any machines designed by humans could possibly be . . . and then those machines design still smarter machines, who design even smarter machines, and so on, in a fast-forward evolution where hundreds or even thousands of “generations” can pass in a year.

  And where will this all lead? What will the A.I.s be like, what will they be capable of, after thousands of “generations” of forced, high-speed, self-directed evolution?

  More importantly, what will their relationship with us, with mere organic unevolved human beings, be like? What will it be like for us to share the planet with superintelligent inorganic creatures many times smarter than we are? Creatures so much smarter and faster-thinking than we are that the gulf between us and them may eventually be greater than the gulf between us and an ant?

  Will they conquer us? Exterminate us? Coexist with us in peaceful cooperation? Ignore us and go about their own enigmatic and incomprehensible concerns? Fuse with us in some sort of benevolent symbiosis? Become as gods to us? (And if the latter, will their rule over us be malevolent or benign? Sternly paternalistic or frivolous and playfully random?) Treat us as pets? Revere us as their beloved ancestors? Put us in the equivalent of a Nature Reserve, to be observed in our Natural Habitats?

  And who will get to go to the stars? Them, or us? Or will it take both of us working together to get there?

  These are some of the questions most central to the best of modern science fiction today, and there are as many answers as there are writers, sparking the kind of give-and-take debate that produces the best that the genre has to offer and signposts to our many possible tomorrows.

  So open the pages of this book, and let some of today’s most expert dreamers show you worlds where A.I.s have spread their influence not only over this Earth but over many alternate Earths in nearby dimensions . . . where a woman must match wits against a runaway A.I. in order to save her children . . . where benevolent A.I.s give a transcendental birthday gift to everyone in the world . . . where only an enigmatic alien A.I. possesses the knowledge to save the world from an onrushing cosmic catastrophe . . . where scientists find it difficult to control an A.I. with the powers and omnipotence of a god . . . where humans and A.I.s coexist uneasily, each society unseen by the other . . . except in the illicit and forbidden zones where they meet . . . where love builds between a sentient spaceship and its half-human pilot, in spite of all the obstacles in the way . . .

  Enjoy!

  (For further speculations on this theme, check out our Ace anthologies Beyond Flesh, Nanotech, Hackers, Immortals, and Future War.)

  Antibodies

  Charles Stross

  Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead (in fact, as one of the key Writers to Watch in the Oughts), with a sudden burst in the last few years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “A Colder War,” “Bear Trap,” “Dechlorinating the Moderator,” “Toast: A Con Report,” “Lobsters,” “Troubadour,” “Tourist,” “Halo,” “Router,” and “Nightfall,” in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Odyssey, Strange Plasma, and New Worlds. Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. He has “published” a novel online, Scratch Monkey, available to be read on his website (www.antipope.org/charlie/), and serialized another novel, The Atrocity Archive, in the magazine Spectrum SF. His most recent book is his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures, and coming up is a major new novel, Singularity Sky. He’s been on the Hugo Final Ballot twice in the last two years: in 2002 with his story “Lobsters” and in 2003 with “Halo.” He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

  In the fast-paced and innovative story that follows, he suggests that by the time you can begin to worry that it might not be a good idea to create a superintelligent A.I., it may already be too late to do anything about it.

  * * *

  Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. Gandhi, the Pope, Thatcher—if you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the ticker-tape of history etched across your senses. You can kill a politician but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians?

  I was elbow-deep in an eviscerated PC, per
forming open-heart surgery on a diseased network card, when the news about the traveling salesman theorem came in. Over on the other side of the office John’s terminal beeped, notification of incoming mail. A moment later my own workstation bonged.

  “Hey, Geoff! Get a load of this!”

  I carried on screwing the card back into its chassis. John is not a priority interrupt.

  “Someone’s come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P! There’s a posting in comp.risks saying they’ve used it to find an O* (n^2) solution to the traveling salesman problem, and it scales! Looks like April First has come early this year, doesn’t it?”

  I dropped the PC’s lid on the floor hastily and sat down at my workstation. Another cubed-sphere hypothesis, another flame war in the math newsgroups—or something more serious? “When did it arrive?” I called over the partition. Soroya, passing my cubicle entrance with a cup of coffee, cast me a dirty look; loud voices aren’t welcome in open-plan offices.

  “This just in,” John replied. I opened up the mail tool and hit on the top of the list, which turned out to be a memo from HR about diversity awareness training. No, next . . . they want to close the smoking room and make us a 100 percent tobacco-free workplace. Hmm. Next.

  Forwarded e-mail: headers bearing the spoor of a thousand mail servers, from Addis Ababa to Ulan Bator. Before it had entered our internal mail network it had traveled from Taiwan to Rochester, NY, then to UCB in the Bay Area, then via a mailing list to all points; once in-company it had been bounced to everyone in engineering and management by the first recipient, Eric the Canary. (Eric is the departmental plant. Spends all the day web-dozing for juicy nuggets of new information if you let him. A one-man wire service: which is why I always ended up finishing his jobs.)

  I skimmed the message, then read it again. Blinked. This kind of stuff is heavy on the surreal number theory: about as digestible as an Egyptian mummy soaked in tabasco sauce for three thousand years. Then I poked at the web page the theorem was on.

  No response—server timed out.

  Someone or something was hitting on the web server with the proof: I figured it had to be all the geeks who’d caught wind of the chain letter so far. My interest was up, so I hit the reload button, and something else came up on screen.

  Lots of theorems—looked like the same stuff as the e-mail, only this time with some fun graphics. Something tickled my hindbrain then, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Next thing, I hit the print button and the inkjet next to my desk began to mutter and click. There was a link near the bottom of the page to the author’s bibliography, so I clicked on that and the server threw another “go away, I’m busy” error. I tugged my beard thoughtfully, and instead of pressing “back,” I pressed “reload.”

  The browser thought to itself for a bit—then a page began to appear on my screen. The wrong page. I glanced at the document title at the top and froze:

  THE PAGE AT THIS LOCATION HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN.

  Please enter your e-mail address if you require further information.

  Hmm.

  As soon as the printout was finished, I wandered around to the photocopier next door to the QA labs and ran off a copy. Faxed it to a certain number, along with an EYES UP note on a yellow Post-it. Then I poked my head around into the QA lab itself. It was dingy in there, as usual, and half the cubicles were empty of human life. Nobody here but us computers; workstations humming away, sucking juice and meditating on who-knew-what questions. (Actually, I did know: they were mostly running test harnesses, repetitively pounding simulated input data into the programs we’d so carefully built, in the hope of making them fall over or start singing “God Save the King.”) The efficiency of code was frequently a bone of contention between our departments, but the war between software engineering and quality assurance is a long-drawn-out affair: each side needs the other to justify its survival.

  I was looking for Amin. Amin with the doctorate in discrete number theory, now slumming it in this company of engineers: my other canary in a number-crunching coal mine. I found him, feet propped up on the lidless hulk of a big Compaq server, mousing away like mad at a big monitor. I squinted; it looked vaguely familiar . . . “Quake? Or Golgotha?” I asked.

  “Golgotha. We’ve got Marketing bottled up on the second floor.”

  “How’s the network looking?”

  He shrugged. “No crashes, no dropped packets—this cut looks pretty solid. We’ve been playing for three days now. What can I do for you?”

  I shoved the printout under his nose. “This seem feasible to you?”

  “Hold on a mo.” He hit the pause key then scanned it rapidly. Did a double-take. “You’re not shitting?”

  “Came out about two hours ago.”

  “Jesus Homeboy Christ riding into town at the head of a convoy of Hell’s Angels with a police escort . . .” He shook his head. Amin always swears by Jesus, a weird side-effect of a westernized Islamic upbringing: take somebody else’s prophet’s name in vain. “If it’s true, I can think of at least three different ways we can make money at it, and at least two more to end up in prison. You don’t use PGP, do you?”

  “Why bother?” I asked, my heart pounding. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “If this is true”—he tapped the papers—“then every encryption algorithm except the one-time pad has just fallen over. Take a while to be sure, but . . . that crunch you heard in the distance was the sound of every secure commerce server on the internet succumbing to a brute-force attack. The script kiddies will be creaming themselves. Jesus Christ.” He rubbed his mustache thoughtfully.

  “Does it make sense to you?” I persisted.

  “Come back in five minutes and I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  I wandered over to the coffee station, thinking very hard. People hung around and generally behaved as if it was just another day; maybe it was. But then again, if that paper was true, quite a lot of stones had just been turned over and if you were one of the pale guys who lived underneath, it was time to scurry for cover. And it had looked good to me: by the prickling in my palms and the gibbering cackle in the back of my skull, something very deep had recognized it. Amin’s confirmation would be just the icing on the cake, confirmation that it was a workable proof.

  Cryptography—the science of encoding messages—relies on certain findings in mathematics: that certain operations are inherently more difficult than others. For example, finding the common prime factors of a long number which is a product of those primes is far harder than taking two primes and multiplying them together.

  Some processes are not simply made difficult, but impossible because of this asymmetry; it’s not feasible to come up with a deterministic answer to certain puzzles in finite time. Take the traveling salesman problem, for example. A salesman has to visit a whole slew of cities which are connected to their neighbors by a road network. Is there a way for the salesman to figure out a best possible route that visits each city without wasting time by returning to a previously visited site, for all possible networks of cities? The conventional answer is no—and this has big implications for a huge set of computing applications. Network topology, expert systems—the traditional tool of the A.I. community—financial systems, and . . .

  Me and my people.

  * * *

  Back in the QA lab, Amin was looking decidedly thoughtful.

  “What do you know?” I asked.

  He shook the photocopy at me. “Looks good,” he said. “I don’t understand it all, but it’s at least credible.”

  “How does it work?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a topological transform. You know how most NP-incomplete problems, like the traveling salesman problem, are basically equivalent? And they’re all graph-traversal issues. How to figure out the correct order to carry out a sequence of operations, or how to visit each node in a graph in the correct order. Anyway, this paper’s about a method of reducing such problems to a much simpler for
m. He’s using a new theorem in graph theory that I sort of heard about last year but didn’t pay much attention to, so I’m not totally clear on all the details. But if this is for real . . .”

  “Pretty heavy?”

  He grinned. “You’re going to have to rewrite the route discovery code. Never mind, it’ll run a bit faster . . .”

  * * *

  I rose out of cubicle hell in a daze, blinking in the cloud-filtered daylight. Eight years lay in ruins behind me, tattered and bleeding bodies scattered in the wreckage. I walked to the landscaped car park: on the other side of the world, urban renewal police with M16s beat the crap out of dissident organizers, finally necklacing them in the damp, humid night. War raged on three fronts, spaced out around a burning planet. Even so, this was by no means the worst of all possible worlds. It had problems, sure, but nothing serious—until now. Now it had just acquired a sucking chest wound; none of those wars were more than a stubbed toe in comparison to the nightmare future that lay ahead.

  Insert key in lock, open door. Drive away, secrets open to the wind, everything blown to hell and gone.

  I’d have to call Eve. We’d have to evacuate everybody.