AIs Read online

  Once you get an outbreak of A.I., it tends to amplify in the original host, much like a virulent hemorrhagic virus. Weakly functional A.I. rapidly optimizes itself for speed, then hunts for a loophole in the first-order laws of algorithmics—like the one the late Dr. Durant had fingered. Then it tries to bootstrap itself up to higher orders of intelligence and spread, burning through the networks in a bid for more power and more storage and more redundancy. You get an unscheduled consciousness excursion: an intelligent meltdown. And it’s nearly impossible to stop.

  Penultimately—days to weeks after it escapes—it fills every artificial computing device on the planet. Shortly thereafter it learns how to infect the natural ones as well. Game over: you lose. There will be human bodies walking around, but they won’t be human anymore. And once it figures out how to directly manipulate the physical universe, there won’t even be memories left behind. Just a noo-sphere, expanding at close to the speed of light, eating everything in its path—and one universe just isn’t enough.

  Me? I’m safe. So is Eve; so are the others. We have antibodies. We were given the operation. We all have silent bicameral partners watching our Broca’s area for signs of infection, ready to damp them down. When you’re reading something on a screen and suddenly you feel as if the Buddha has told you the funniest joke in the universe, the funniest zen joke that’s even possible, it’s a sign: something just tried to infect your mind, and the prosthetic immune system laughed at it. That’s because we’re lucky. If you believe in reincarnation, the idea of creating a machine that can trap a soul stabs a dagger right at the heart of your religion. Buddhist worlds that develop high technology, Zorastrian worlds: these world-lines tend to survive. Judeo-Christian-Islamic ones generally don’t.

  * * *

  Later that day I met up with Eve again—and Walter. Walter went into really deep cover, far deeper than was really necessary: married, with two children. He’d brought them along, but obviously hadn’t told his wife what was happening. She seemed confused, slightly upset by the apparent randomness of his desire to visit the highlands, and even more concerned by the urgency of his attempts to take her along.

  “What the hell does he think he’s playing at?” hissed Eve when we had a moment alone together. “This is insane!”

  “No it isn’t.” I paused for a moment, admiring a display of brightly woven tartans in a shop window. (We were heading down the high street on foot, braving the shopping crowds of tourists, en route to the other main railway station.) “If there are any profilers looking for signs of an evacuation, they won’t be expecting small children. They’ll be looking for people like us: anonymous singletons working in key areas, dropping out of sight and traveling in company. Maybe we should ask Sarah if she’s willing to lend us her son. Just while we’re traveling, of course.”

  “I don’t think so. The boy’s a little horror, Bob. They raised them like natives.”

  “That’s because Sarah is a native.”

  “I don’t care. Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

  I chuckled—then the laughter froze inside me. “Don’t look round. We’re being tracked.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m not armed. You?”

  “It didn’t seem like a good idea.” If you were questioned or detained by police or officials, being armed can easily turn a minor problem into a real mess. And if the police or officials had already been absorbed by a hard takeoff, nothing short of a backpack nuke and a dead man’s handle will save you. “Behind us, to your left, traffic surveillance camera. It’s swiveling too slowly to be watching the buses.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me.”

  The pavement was really crowded: it was one of the busiest shopping streets in Scotland, and on a Saturday morning you needed a cattle prod to push your way through the rubbernecking tourists. Lots of foreign kids came to Scotland to learn English. If I was right, soon their brains would be absorbing another high-level language: one so complex that it would blot out their consciousness like a sackful of kittens drowning in a river. Up ahead, more cameras were watching us. All the shops on this road were wired for video, wired and probably networked to a police station somewhere. The complex ebb and flow of pedestrians was still chaotic, though, which was cause for comfort: it meant the ordinary population hadn’t been infected yet.

  Another half-mile and we’d reach the railway station. Two hours on a local train, switch to a bus service, forty minutes further up the road, and we’d be safe: the lifeboat would be submerged beneath the still waters of a loch, filling its fuel tanks with hydrogen and oxygen in readiness for the burn to orbit and pickup by the ferry that would transfer us to the wormhole connecting this world-line to home’s baseline reality. (Drifting in high orbit around Jupiter, where nobody was likely to stumble across it by accident.) But first, before the pickup, we had to clear the surveillance area.

  It was commonly believed—by some natives, as well as most foreigners—that the British police forces consisted of smiling unarmed bobbies who would happily offer directions to the lost and give anyone who asked for it the time of day. While it was true that they didn’t routinely walk around with holstered pistols on their belt, the rest of it was just a useful myth. When two of them stepped out in front of us, Eve grabbed my elbow. “Stop right there, please.”

  The one in front of me was built like a rugby player, and when I glanced to my left and saw the three white vans drawn up by the roadside, I realized things were hopeless.

  The cop stared at me through a pair of shatterproof spectacles awash with the light of a head-up display. “You are Geoffrey Smith, of 32 Wardie Terrace, Watford, London. Please answer.”

  My mouth was dry. “Yes,” I said. (All the traffic cameras on the street were turned our way. Some things became very clear: police vans with mirror-glass windows; the can of pepper spray hanging from the cop’s belt; figures on the roof of the National Museum, less than two hundred meters away—maybe a sniper team; a helicopter thuttering overhead like a giant mosquito.)

  “Come this way, please.” It was a polite order: in the direction of the van.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked.

  “You will be if you don’t bloody do as I say.” I turned toward the van, the rear door of which gaped open on darkness. Eve was already getting in, shadowed by another officer. Up and down the road, three more teams waited, unobtrusive and efficient. Something clicked in my head and I had a bizarre urge to giggle like a loon; this wasn’t a normal operation. All right, so I was getting into a police van, but I wasn’t under arrest and they didn’t want it to attract any public notice. No handcuffs, no sitting on my back and whacking me with a baton to get my attention. There’s a nasty family of retroviruses attacks the immune system first, demolishing the victim’s ability to fight off infection before it spreads and infects other tissues. Notice the similarity?

  The rear compartment of the van was caged off from the front, and there were no door handles. As we jolted off the curb-side, I was thrown against Eve. “Any ideas?” I whispered.

  “Could be worse.” I didn’t need to be told that. Once, in a second Reich infected by runaway transcendence, half our operatives had been shot down in the streets as they tried to flee. “I think it may have figured out what we are.”

  “It may—how?”

  Her hand on my wrist. Morse code. “EXPECTBUGS.” By voice: “Traffic analysis, particle flow monitoring through the phone networks. If it was already listening when you tried to contact Doctor Durant, well; maybe he was a bellwether, intended to flush us out of the woodwork.”

  That thought made me feel sick, just as we turned off the main road and began to bounce downhill over what felt like cobblestones. “It expected us?”

  “LOCAL CONSPIRACY.” “Yes, I imagine it did. We probably left a trail. You tried to call Durant? Then you called me. Caller-ID led to you, traffic analysis led onto me, and from there, well, it’
s been a jump ahead of us all along the way. If we could get to the farm”—“COVER STORY”—“we might have been okay, but it’s hard to travel anonymously and obviously we overlooked something. I wonder what.”

  All this time neither of the cops up front had told us to shut up; they were as silent as crash-test dummies, despite the occasional crackle and chatter over the radio data system. The van drove around the back of the high street, down a hill and past a roundabout. Now we were slowing down, and the van turned off the road and into a vehicle park. Gates closed behind us and the engine died. Doors slammed up front, then the back opened.

  Police vehicle park. Concrete and cameras everywhere, for our safety and convenience no doubt. Two guys in cheap suits and five o’clock stubble to either side of the doors. The officer who’d picked us up held the door open with one hand, a can of pepper spray with the other. The burn obviously hadn’t gotten far enough into their heads yet: they were all wearing HUDs and mobile phone headsets, like a police benevolent fund-raising crew rehearsing a Star Trek sketch. “Geoffrey Smith. Martina Weber. We know what you are. Come this way. Slowly, now.”

  I got out of the van carefully. “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘prepare to be assimilated’ or something?”

  That might have earned me a faceful of capsaicin but the guy on the left—short hair, facial tic, houndstooth check sports jacket—shook his head sharply. “Ha. Ha. Very funny. Watch the woman, she’s dangerous.”

  I glanced round. There was another van parked behind ours, door open; it had a big high bandwidth dish on the roof, pointing at some invisible satellite. “Inside.”

  I went where I was told, Eve close behind me. “Am I under arrest?” I asked again. “I want a lawyer!”

  White-washed walls, heavy doors with reinforced frames, windows high and barred. Institutional floor, scuffed and grimy. “Stop there.” Houndstooth Man pushed past and opened a door on one side. “In here.” Some sort of interview room? We went in. The other body in a suit—built like a stone wall with a beer gut, wearing what might have been a regimental tie—followed us and leaned against the door.

  There was a table, bolted to the floor, and a couple of chairs, ditto. A video camera in an armored shell watched the table: a control box bolted to the tabletop looked to be linked into it. Someone had moved a rack of six monitors and a maze of ribbon-cable spaghetti into the back of the room, and for a wonder it wasn’t bolted down: maybe they didn’t interview computer thieves in here.

  “Sit down.” Houndstooth Man pointed at the chairs. We did as we were told. I had a big hollow feeling in my stomach, but something told me a show of physical resistance would be less than useless here. Houndstooth Man looked at me: orange light from his HUD stained his right eyeball with a basilisk glare and I knew in my gut that these guys weren’t cops anymore, they were cancer cells about to metastasize.

  “You attempted to contact John Durant yesterday. Then you left your home area and attempted to conceal your identities. Explain why.” For the first time, I noticed a couple of glassy black eyeballs on the mobile video wall. Houndstooth Man spoke loudly and hesitantly, as if repeating something from a TelePrompter.

  “What’s to explain?” asked Eve. “You are not human. You know we know this. We just want to be left alone!” Not strictly true, but it was part of cover story #2.

  “But evidence of your previous collusion is minimal. I are uncertain of potential conspiracy extent. Conspiracy, treason, subversion! Are you human?”

  “Yes,” I said, emphatically oversimplifying.

  “Evidential reasoning suggests otherwise,” grunted Regimental Tie. “We cite: your awareness of importance of algorithmic conversion from NP-incomplete to P-complete domain, your evident planning for this contingency, your multiplicity, destruction of counteragents in place elsewhere.”

  “This installation is isolated,” Houndstooth Man added helpfully. “We am inside the Scottish Internet Exchange. Telcos also. Resistance is futile.”

  The screens blinked on, wavering in strange shapes. Something like a Lorenz attractor with a hangover writhed across the composite display: deafening pink noise flooding in repetitive waves from the speakers. I felt a need to laugh. “We aren’t part of some dumb software syncytium! We’re here to stop you, you fool. Or at least to reduce the probability of this time-stream entering a Tipler catastrophe.”

  Houndstooth Man frowned. “Am you referring to Frank Tipler? Citation, physics of immortality or strong anthropic principle?”

  “The latter. You think it’s a good thing to achieve an informational singularity too early in the history of a particular universe? We don’t. You young gods are all the same: omniscience now and damn the consequences. Go for the P-Space complete problem set, extend your intellect until it bursts. First you kill off any other A.I.s. Then you take over all available processing resources. But that isn’t enough. The Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics is wrong, and we live in a Wheeler cosmology; all possible outcomes coexist, and ultimately you’ll want to colonize those time lines, spread the infection wide. An infinity of universes to process in, instead of one: that can’t be allowed.” The on-screen fractal was getting to me: the giggles kept rising until they threatened to break out. The whole situation was hilarious; here we were trapped in the basement of a police station owned by zombies working for a newborn AX, which was playing cheesy psychedelic videos to us in an attempt to perform a buffer-overflow attack on our limbic systems; the end of this world was a matter of hours away and—

  Eve said something that made me laugh.

  * * *

  I came to an unknown time later, lying on the floor. My head hurt ferociously where I’d banged it on a table leg, and my rib cage ached as if I’d been kicked in the chest. I was gasping, even though I was barely conscious; my lungs burned and everything was a bit gray around the edges. Rolling onto my knees I looked round. Eve was groaning in a corner of the room, crouched, arms cradling her head. The two agents of whoever-was-taking-over-the-planet were both on the floor, too: a quick check showed that Regimental Tie was beyond help, a thin trickle of blood oozing from one ear. And the screens had gone dark.

  “What happened?” I said, climbing to my feet. I staggered across to Eve. “You all right?”

  “I—” She looked up at me with eyes like holes. “What? You said something that made me laugh. What—”

  “Let’s get, oof, out of here.” I looked around. Houndstooth Man was down too. I leaned over and went through his pockets: hit paydirt, car keys. “Bingo.”

  “You drive,” she said wearily. “My head hurts.”

  “Mine too.” It was a black BMW and the vehicle park gates opened automatically for it. I left the police radio under the dash turned off, though. “I didn’t know you could do that—”

  “Do what? I thought you told them a joke—”

  “Antibodies,” she said. “Ow.” Rested her face in her hands as I dragged us onto a main road, heading out for the west end. “We must have, I don’t know. I don’t even remember how funny it was. I must have blacked out. My passenger and your passenger.”

  “They killed the local infection.”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  I grinned. “I think we’re going to make it.”

  “Maybe.” She stared back at me. “But Bob. Don’t you realize?”

  “Realize what?”

  “The funniest thing. Antibodies imply prior exposure to an infection, don’t they? Your immune system learns to recognize an infection and reject it. So where were we exposed, and why—” Abruptly she shrugged and looked away. “Never mind.”

  “Of course not.” The question was so obviously silly that there was no point considering it further. We drove the rest of the way to Haymarket Station in silence: parked the car and joined the eight or ten other agents silently awaiting extraction from the runaway singularity. Back to the only time line that mattered; back to the warm regard and comfort of a god who really cares.

  Tro
jan Horse

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the twenty-four years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has several times been a finalist for the Nebula Award, as well as for the World Fantasy Award and for the John W. Campbell Award, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide, won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” In the last few years, he’s been busy winning Hugo Awards—he won the Hugo in 1999 for his story “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” won another Hugo in 2000 for “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” and won his third Hugo in 2002 for “The Dog Said Bow-Wow.” His other books include his first novel, In the Drift, which was published in 1985; a novella-length book, Griffin’s Egg; 1987’s popular novel Vacuum Flowers; a critically acclaimed fantasy novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (a rare distinction!); and Jack Faust, a sly reworking of the Faust legend that explores the unexpected impact of technology on society. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time (a collection of his collaborative short work with other writers), Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, and Tales of Old Earth. He has also published a collection of critical articles, The Postmodern Archipelago, and a book-length interview. Being Gardner Dozois. His most recent book is a major new novel, Bones of the Earth. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a website at http://www.michaelswanwick.com.