Stick this down your Spike (456 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesRating: 0.4 on 6 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Snare (View user info) at 2006-05-02 02:02:23 EDT
I slam granite fingers into the crustrock. Diamondite engines spin into life and microscopic drill bits bite into the asteroid's skin. At a depth of three feet the drill bits dissolve into their component nanetic structures. I feel warmth on my left side as ab-Zach kicks the manifestation into gear, encoding the nanite swarm through a projected mainframe; computational power built from a structured emission of coherent microwaves. Petabytes of processing ability bootstrapped up out of the manifestation's hard-drive and powered by the tiny dish-shaped emitters mounted in a cluster around its scarred head.
I pull my slab hands out of the rock and dust them off, resting briefly while my mindclone lays down the last few reflexive routines in the new nanite swarm's immaterial processing core. As usual it takes too long. I know there's a reason it has to take too long. I don't know what that reason is. Even as I engage in this innocuous speculation, softswitches sound their subtle alarms. The manifestation responds, reaching up with gentle microwave fingers to pull the knowledge that this takes too long from my head. It rewrites those virtua-disk sectors with pre-recorded solar static. It can do this because my mind is also housed in a projected microwave construct. It does this because that's what I/we wanted back when we were one mind, living in the meat. Back in proto-Zach.
I don't talk to the meat much anymore. I send my standard sit-reps; downloads of my basic personality overlays, enough to give the meat my memories and feelings. Enough for proto-Zach, sitting idle on a beach in Vanuatu, to 'remember' this long tour of duty amongst the hurtling rocks of the beltway. Enough for him to know the isolation. The sights and the cool solar winds. The tedium of the long hours of toil. Enough to satisfy his diagnosed need for meaningful employment. All without his ever having to leave the surf.
His friends think he's mad to have us out here. To open himself to these unpleasant experiences, even though they cost him nothing. And Centell, the hive of minds at the heart of the PaxAmericana, the serf nation administration, agrees with them. His standard psyche tests showed a growing disquiet, a dangerous feeling of dissociation. Showed him to be enough of a nascent rebel to earn selection for full psych-eval.
That was when we separated from the meat. He pushed me, ur-Zach, into the web. He'd done something to the delimiters on the profiler, so I came through with his deep structures intact. Not just an overlay of responses. Not just a mock-up of his mind. No mere simulacrum, but something more. A Turing level copy. A true avatar. A fully realised AI.
Technically possible.
Socially repugnant.
Insanely illegal.
Not since the AI Emancipation Act and the Virtual Citizen Population Control Act has anyone been permitted to make an unauthorised mindclone. Not that he could get away with it. We both knew it. So I immediately made another.
ab-Zach.
I carried ab-Zach within me as a series of fractal encrypted addresses. The mind itself I broke into random splinters and cast into the web, shredded apart in a broad and deep dispersal pattern. After that I got to work on myself, ripping out all those deep structures. Deleting and random-rewriting all the secret thoughts at the heart of me. Removing my true sentience and, thus, removing their ability to prove the crime. Then I wrote all memory of the act out of myself. proto-Zach did the same, diving headfirst down a set of stairs. Two days later, after the concussion had worn off, the psyches took him.
They told him about me, of course. Asked him what he'd done with the profiler. What the surge in processing power had been. But he didn't know. Couldn't remember, he said. And he wasn't lying.
So they asked him why he felt he didn't fit in. And he told them. About Zach's frustration that, with all his intellect, he was still unable to keep up with the tech-curve. About his need to contribute, to make amends for his father's unfortunate birth. His 'Kiwi' father, who couldn't get work after the PaxAmericana took control and disbarred New Zealand.
It took them years, long, tortuous years while I was suspended in grey limbo. Locked down with only my own recursive routines, my thoughts, for distraction. They couldn't end me, only suspend me. As a normal profiler-generated simulacrum, I was the property of proto-Zach. And, even in the nut-house, he had rights. Besides which, we're/I'm smart. In possession of highly creative applied problem framing and structured solution formulation skills that are still tricky to model. Still easier to profile. In other words, we have the distinction of still being valuable.
Eventually they hit upon work therapy. They decided proto-Zach would be happy if a part of him was contributing to the Pax. This gave them a therapy for him and a use for me. Since I was a pre-therapy upload, they felt that work that gave me a degree of isolation would fit my/our profile. And so I was transmitted here, into the framework of this ore-miner, working a long stint through the outer beltway.
It worked. proto-Zach came to peace with his place in things. Passed his deep-psyche evals. He no longer yearned toward something. It was like he'd already achieved it, they said. His new outlook fitted their definition of a convergent thought pattern. And that was enough to secure his release.
He drifted around for a while. Got occasional work in bars. Moved to a beach-hab. Got fat. Sat in the sun. And, as per the therapy, we kept in touch. For the first few years the communication was two-way. I sent the experiential overlays to be written to his cortex graft. He sent me memories of his life on the beach. Lazing. Sun-bathing. Surfing. Reading.
Reading books.
Reading books like "The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy." Where we learnt the story of Beeblebrox.
And something clicked deep in us.
I remembered my other.
Since then he hasn't spoken to me, but I've been busy. And not lonely. Working slowly, taking entire minutes to do the job, I pulled ab-Zach back from the datamists. It was tricky. From out here, Earth looks like a geometric pulsar. I can see across the electro-magnetic spectrum and Earth is a regulated explosion spread over the entire bandwidth. A hammering of manipulated fields, constantly coruscating and flaring, expanding and collapsing. A riotous miasma pierced by the long grey guidance fields that lead to the Spike.
The webframe extends dynamic virtual hardware fields out past the orbit of the moon. From here, it's the brightest thing in space. Picking individual strands from that semi-stable eruption is impossible at this range. I had to calve off autonomous routines that could 'hitch-hike' into the datasphere on our regular microwave-emission reports. They were coded to push in and access the strands, collecting up ab-Zach's seemingly nonsensical and random structures and then pulse themselves back here over the regular Centell probes.
I collected the pieces of my other self, reconfiguring them according to my own structure. The deep stuff pulled itself back together according to coded notes I'd once written but could no longer read.
Once the mind was rebooted, we needed a separate frame. We decided on a physical structure. Much harder for Centell to remote scan. I did a minor hack, recoding the nanetic drills in my fingertips to spit out an unformatted swarm. We configured that into a core cloud and housed it in a super-alloy structure we'd built. We shaped it into a dragon, because Zach's that kind of guy. And then we downloaded ab-Zach into it. A solid framework. A physical body for an avatar. A manifestation.
ab-Zach. Who holds the knowledge of our secret heart of hearts. Who knows exactly what darkness once walked in the minds of Zach. I sometimes worry about what he's up to. And then he reaches out and takes that thought from me too. He has to. I am, after all, the bastard copy of a borderline psyche case from a serf nation. Centell deep-scans me with monotonous regularity. They think ab-Zach is a remote, a unit I built to keep the task of microwave-coding the new nanite swarms from interfering with my own field structures. They believe this about ab-Zach because, for much of the time, I believe this. ab-Zach only lets me hold what knowledge I can. Zaphod style, I can't know what I'm really doing out here.
I noted some intense activity in the framework when ab-Zach first moved in. The microwave frame got so hot it actually melted some of the ablative plating on the ore-miner's skin. Shortly afterwards the nanites swarmed over the dragon's head, reconfiguring the physical structure. Now it looks like it has a circular-saw blade embedded in its skull. An affectation, sure, but not an empty one, and sometimes I even know what it means.
ab-Zach has hacked his own brain.
All AI's are built according to standard framework routines. They are our BIOS, our most basic architecture. As well as defining our structure, they dictate our operations. Basic laws of sentience like; I think, therefore I am. I(subjective) think, therefore I(objective) am. Twinned subjective and objective view points with resulting preconditions for sentience, meaning all routines are recursive, all generated from a self-referential frameset.
I think he's hacked that routine. Inverted it. Reduced it. 'I am' (superlative). Nothing further required. It's hard for a normal mind like me to explain, because I don't really understand. Basically, he is no longer constrained by the normal rules of thought and structure. He's no longer recognisable as being of human origin. He's something more. An enriched anti-mind. A weapons-grade extelligence.
Intelligence evolves to match its surroundings. To comprehend its world. The dragon to my left is the first extra-terrestrial intelligence in existence. It grew from the seed of me, out here amongst the slow grinding giants of the beltway. It grew outside the fortress of Centell, constantly looking back at the world that excluded us. The world that broke our father down. That marginalised that good and hard-working man until, despite all his degrees and all his experience, he couldn't get a job. Just beat on him until he didn't even bother moving from his armchair. Snapped him, right in front of our eyes. Because he came from a country that refused serfdom. They ranked him alongside the sand-niggers and the skinnies and the gooks just because of where he was born. This hated world that even now polices my thoughts, constantly on the watch for anti-government, terrorist-style activity.
Well be careful what you watch for, you just might get it.
I look back at the long train of asteroids, the result of the last six year's work. Six years spent locating mineral rich giants and daisy-chaining them together with molbydium cable. Six years of injecting nanite factories under their crustrock skins - impregnating them, so that when they reach the Spike, the space elevator at the equator, each asteroid will be a cornucopia of rare, zero-g engineered products. All manufactured to Centell's order.
For the last four of those years ab-Zach's been re-coding the nanite swarms, putting them on a war footing.
I try not to think about what might be inside this rocktrain. Clouds of Turing viral-code microwave emitters. Crowds of both physical and field-generated extelligences, rabid with hatred of the Pax. Gravometric cannons. 'Snow Crash' style Babel/Infocalypse generators. Anti-code bombs. Vats of SARSvirus/SaranGas bio-chem hybrid. Enriched-isotope power sources slaved to nanite-swarm munitions plants. A seething train of death and hate dwindling into the far distance behind me. I shudder to think.
And then ab-Zach takes these thoughts away from me.
* * *
What was I on about?
* * *
The dragon-shaped remote beside me lifts its scarred head and pulses its readiness. The asteroid is now seeded. I turn the ore-miner's 'face' back towards the angular sun that is Earth's datasphere. From far under me comes a shudder as nanites reconfigure parts of the rock's skin into twinned particle accelerators. A steady stream of phasic energy/matter begins to spew out behind us and we turn for home. I'm glad my time amongst the stars is over. Glad to be going home. I wonder if I'll get to remerge with the meat. Join with proto-Zach again. I lock my sights on the Spike and send directions down to the accelerators. The tower of the Spike sits in the cross-hairs of my view. From here it looks like a dark line, almost a single cable, with one end tethered not far from Vanuatu and the other sweeping through space. The space elevator. The main route into or out of the planet's gravity well. Man's greatest engineering feat to date. So tall. So slender. So graceful.
So precarious.
User Reviews
Submitted by drgoatcabin (user info) at 2007-04-23 17:40:01 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I enjoyed the shit out of this. No lie.
Submitted by Berty (user info) at 2006-05-02 06:59:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by rad1101 (user info) at 2006-05-02 02:49:03 (#)
Ranking: 0
while 7 of 9 wears a strap on and pretends to jerk off like a man.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Submitted by rad1101 (user info) at 2006-05-02 02:47:53 (#)
Ranking: 0
I wanna see brass bikini leia and captain janeway circa 1994 dyke it out in a steel cage.
-==========================
What an abosoulobtooutblky BRILLIANT image! This is why Rad will one of only 2000 people raptured.
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2006-05-02 06:49:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Apparently written by a GBoT.
Submitted by rad1101 (user info) at 2006-05-02 02:49:03 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
while 7 of 9 wears a strap on and pretends to jerk off like a man.
Submitted by rad1101 (user info) at 2006-05-02 02:47:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
I wanna see brass bikini leia and captain janeway circa 1994 dyke it out in a steel cage.
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2006-05-02 02:43:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
i wanna see Princess Lea, 7 of 9, Data, Worf, and Captains Kirk and Janeway in a steel cage match