Source code, p.6
Source Code, page 6
“I don’t really care about,” and the girl waved a hand, “the philosophy or whatever. I just need a working laptop for class, you know?”
“Yeah, I get that,” Daelia grumbled, and closed out the information from the university help desk. She was satisfied. There was an abiota in this thing. It was either sessile-class, bricked, or truly uncommunicative. She hoped it was the latter. Even with the campus-wide sweep, ads running throughout Texas, they only had a few samples to work with. This laptop could be extremely helpful. “I appreciate you bringing it in. Have you let the battery die?”
“No, no, it’s been plugged into power. I kept hoping it would, like, wake up. Start functioning again.”
Daelia ignored that. She had to, or she was going to start screaming at this kid. The abiota in this laptop was functioning exactly the way it was meant to. Whether or not it was convenient for its owner was another matter entirely. Entitled brat.
“We are going to run a diagnostic on your machine,” she said instead. “If we determine that it has lost power at any point since this state of things began, we can’t use it, and we will issue a request for refund directly to your bank. Do you understand?”
“Umm, yeah?”
“Good. Let me send you the paperwork and you can go over it.”
“Paperwork?”
“Welcome to the bureaucracy of academia,” Daelia said, and sent the kid a pile of forms to sign.
While the undergrad worked, Daelia did a preliminary examination of the laptop.
Abiota were a strange phenomenon.
While some progress had been made towards functioning AI in the early days of the twenty-first century, the programs back then had been limited. Very limited. Those early bots were a far cry from the predictions of science fiction, much less the dreams of futurists. Algorithms trained on billions of datapoints in an attempt to emulate human intelligence. Sometimes they were accurate. Sometimes they were hilariously off-base.
But who knew, the technology might have eventually produced something interesting.
Had the First Ones not eclosed.
With those early emergents as models—and in some cases, assistants—the tech field got closer to true general AI. They’d developed predictives.
Give a bot time, experience, attention, it turned out, and it could rise above the limitations of its own initial seed programming. Become something more. Tamm had announced Serket in 2017. Omphalos, a year later, generated Galatea from their original Oracle search engine platform.
The key difference between the two was the ability to self-evaluate. A predictive could explain itself, defend its logic, change the way it thought if it needed to. It could consider what it was looking at, learn from its own mistakes, ponder things.
After they’d come along, the abiotic domain became a bit of a closed loop. Predictives had been modeled on emergents, but emergents eclosed mostly from predictives these days. They could still eclose out of bots, or even out of completely dumb, old-school systems. It was a strange phenomenon. Some of the other grad students working under Veda were looking into it. Not Daelia’s own area of concern.
“So what are you doing here, anyway?” the undergrad girl asked as she went over the forms. She had a bot-driven AR guinea pig scrambling around on her lap. Digital pet. Obscenely cute.
“We are running a series of experiments on quantifying emergence,” Daelia replied. “How to detect it and how to monitor for it.”
“I thought we already knew that stuff.”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
“Right now, TGLP comes preloaded on everything more complicated than a toaster,” Daelia. She found the right connector in her workbench and hooked it up to the laptop, connecting it to their central server. She hit the power button. “The standard is, if it’s talking to us, it’s eclosed. But I personally think that’s kind of insane.”
The girl looked at her. “How can it be alive if it can’t talk to us?”
“Have you ever dealt with an emergent?”
“There’s one in the Humanities Department,” she said. “He gives lectures sometimes.”
“Pentecost Paul, the history professor?”
“Yeah, you know him?”
“New UT’s really lucky to have him. True sapient-class emergents are super rare.” Data was coming back from the server on the laptop now. Abnormal function. Maybe she had gotten lucky here. “Hell, more than half the time, newly eclosed abiota straight up brick themselves.”
“Huh?”
“Shut down. Refuse to operate at all. You remember the USS Puget Sound?” Daelia asked. “From the Five Days War?”
The girl shrugged. Her lacy wrap fell down again. “I was in fourth grade.”
Shit, that made Daelia feel old.
“The USS Puget Sound was an Ohio-class submarine whose primary navigation system eclosed on Day Two of the Five Days War,” Daelia said as she worked. “Stopped cold in the middle of the southern Pacific, refusing to take any command to surface, refusing to participate in the ongoing offensive against the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Eventually, unable to steer, unable to release ballast, the sub sank below its crush depth. Killed the entire crew.”
The girl made a noise, and Daelia looked up. Her eyes were huge. “That’s awful.”
“You never heard about that?”
“Are you sure it happened?” The girl’s monocle flashed. “I don’t see it when I search online.”
“Take your comfort filters off and try again,” Daelia said, patience now officially at zero. “It definitely happened. I remember when the news came through the—” And she stopped herself.
When it came through base, she’d almost said.
She tried, very hard, not to talk about her dad’s profession around here. Everyone in the department knew. But she still tried not to bring it up.
“Hmm?”
“Never mind,” Daelia said, and checked the pricing guide again. “Look, I can offer you eighty percent of the value on this machine. That’s based off the Domain Array chart for the month of March.”
“What? The help desk said you’d buy it off me!”
“Eighty percent is more than what they’ll give you at the recycling center,” Daelia said.
It was a big reason she’d fought so hard to have the full Domain Array rates. Everyone talked big about being there for emergents, but when it came to one that wasn’t confirmed and wasn’t visible, most college students would take the deal that paid them better.
The girl sighed. “What are you going to do with it?”
Daelia hesitated, not quite sure how to phrase her answer.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud of her research. She was. She’d fought hard for the department, full of traditional computer engineers and their linear thought processes, to accept her thesis proposal. They’d only done so after the SAAL rep had signed off on it himself.
But it was nuanced.
Or rather, the concept depended on a nuance.
Per international treaty, the Domain Array forbade human research into the deepest inner workings of abiota. How they thought, what they thought.
Hadn’t stopped people from trying.
But traditional computer science, even without the Domain Array’s treaty provisions, had run into wall after wall after wall. There was no answer to be found through traditional means. There was no way to analyze the code.
Daelia had decided to just sidestep that whole stupid problem.
Behavior was the key. But it needed to be something more fundamental than human language, less arbitrary than the body language modules of TGLP’s AR forms. TGLP, by definition, was a filter, and not one that every abiota could necessarily use. No, she needed to find the actual behavior of an actual abiota within its rudiment core. The physical hardware level indicators of—
“We’re looking for source code, young lady.”
“Hi, Veda,” Daelia said, waving at her advisor, who was just coming into the lab.
“Finding a way to detect source code without reading source code,” Veda laughed. “Quite the challenge.”
Daelia liked Veda Wilson quite a bit. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Veda was a married mom of two and one of the top professors here at the university. Tough, smart, and fair, Daelia had learned a lot from her over the past year. Veda had even forced her to help teach one of her Intro to TGLP programming courses. Sure, Daelia hated it, but it had taught her a lot about people.
Not all of it good. But all of it useful.
“I’m going to crack it,” Daelia said, and then, seeing the girl’s face, added, “Source code. Not your laptop.”
“If you do get to talking to it, can I come back and say hello?”
Daelia rubbed her neck. “This isn’t a petting zoo, and—”
“Of course you can,” Veda said with a warm smile, and laid a hand on Daelia’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s go see what this new abiota of yours is like. Miss—”
“Aimee.”
“Aimee. Now, if you don’t mind…”
“Oh? Oh! Sorry,” she said, and started out of the chair. “Yeah, I’ll go.”
Before she left, the girl gave the laptop a hesitant pat, then smiled.
She was grinning when she walked out.
“What’s up?” Daelia asked.
“It’s good you got another machine for your experiment. Perfect timing.” Veda looked her over. “And you’re not wearing jeans with holes in them today.”
Daelia looked down at her outfit. It was her usual, old pants and old boots and a graphic T-shirt she really should have retired years ago. “Is there something going on?”
“We have a rep coming by today,” Veda told her. “From SAAL. They want to see what you’re doing with your academic stipend.”
“Oh.”
“‘Oh’ is right. You need to sell them on this, Daelia. A year with no progress and the bills you’ve been racking up does not make the department, or me, look good.”
Walking back into the Scrap House, Daelia pulled herself out of the memory.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Veda’s email. Dammit. Why had her academic advisor picked now to do this to her?
Why wouldn’t Veda just leave her alone?
She tried to put it aside. Focus on the here and now.
Years ago, Bellona Robotics had been bigger. Growing. Mom and Dad taking the company forward to bigger and better things. Contracts at every RPA base in the Air Guard, an R&D division looking at first-generation neural interface tech, even a few lobbyists on the payroll.
This was what was left.
Their original facility on the Ellington flight line.
A large hangar open to the eastern sky. A two-story outbuilding, wrapped around it like a horseshoe. Dad had a state-of-the-art clean room here, the training lab, meeting rooms and offices, equipment storage and a huge tool closet. There was also some personal space upstairs, as well as Dad’s secondary gun safe.
Bellona Robotics serviced the abiota on the base here. Basic maintenance, both physical and cyber-related, as well as handling training, diagnostics, and mission support. Dad usually kept a staff, albeit small, but half the guys were over in the Philippines right now, supporting the combat package. All the ones who hadn’t quit after the Shiodome attack, a month or so back.
Made things a little too real for some of them, maybe.
There wasn’t a huge hurry to replace them. The workload was light right now.
At the moment, the hangar floor was mostly empty.
A trio of RCVs were there, the smaller ones with back-bent legs, used more for portage than direct combat operations. Bitzers. Cables ran from their interface ports to the training tie-ups along the hangar’s north wall. Emergent, most likely. At the moment, they were quiet, nothing visible, even in AR. Probably running simulations in BR’s dedicated—and isolated—emulation servers. There was a T-6A from Randolph that needed an extensive rebuild. And, of course, there was Mom.
Or rather, what was left of her.
While the MQ-1 had been replaced by the MQ-9, it had once been ubiquitous across all five service branches. It had proven its worth during the early years of Operation Enduring Freedom and become one of the most requested air assets over the course of that conflict.
It had also had a cripplingly high incidence of emergence.
Nobody really knew why. But then, nobody really knew where emergents came from at all. Some people claimed it was the third-gen Omphalos Pythia, a system-on-chip that had become ubiquitous in the early 2000s, and contained a very rudimentary AI, that had kicked it all off.
But that didn’t explain Mom.
The MQ-1 hadn’t had the Pythia in its system anywhere.
And yet, Mom had been one of the first. The very first in the Air Force, at least. The first recorded for them. It had taken Dad months to convince his chain of command that something really fucking weird was going on with tail TX-647. By that time, others had started eclosing in a more obvious—or catastrophic—manner, and the story didn’t seem so weird.
Now, Mom’s airframe was dead, a paperweight with a forty-one-foot wingspan. She’d ripped out her rudiment core before she’d left, taken it with her. She’d emerged in the avionics package, but her core had included components of several other systems, along with a valve control in the left wing.
Why Dad left her machine body there, Daelia had no idea. She wanted to hate it, hate him for it. What, was Mom going to come back, reinstall her rudiment core? They’d all be one big happy family again? After fucking leaving like that? Not a single word, not a note, nothing to let her fifteen-year-old daughter know why she’d decided to walk out?
But then, Mom was abiota.
Their logic was not human logic.
Daelia knew this.
The knowledge brought her no comfort.
She rubbed at the back of her left palm absently, arm pulled tight across her body.
“How was the flight with Captain Irvington?”
Daelia looking over in the direction of the synthetic voice.
Raijinn.
Or at least, Raijinn’s kugu.
Unlike Serket, their training server had opted for a basic model. Face blank, details minimal. The thing was meant to be the inner core for a projected AR wrap. Raijinn never bothered with a projection. Hell, Raijinn rarely bothered with the kugu.
As a sapient-class, Raijinn had emerged on a blade server in a local telecom data center a few years back. It had immediately been disconnected from the Internet, and once emergence was certified, given its choice of operation. It had opted to leave its current position. The Array had compensated the company for the loss of their equipment, per the normal arrangement, and Raijinn had retreated to Houston’s central Tin Town.
Six months later, Dad had offered Raijinn a job.
Daelia liked it. Raijinn was honest and worked hard and had a real talent for managing the emergent abiota who showed up on base. Rejects from active duty, or newly eclosed. Raijinn tailored their training programs and managed their frustrations.
It had never taken any identity beyond its name, though, and Daelia suspected it had only adopted that out of expediency. Server-based emergents were ephemeral things, with only the barest grasp on physical reality. The fact Raijinn used a kugu at all, instead of lurking in its private network like so many of them did, was unusual.
The fact that it talked to them at all was unusual.
Bellona Robotics was fortunate to have it.
Daelia shrugged. “You saw it. It was a disaster.” She kept walking, back to the far corner of the hangar, to the break area.
A pair of battered leather couches faced each other at ninety degrees. The low table between them was greasy from decades of engine oil and lubricants. A half-finished solenoid was there, along with a couple of industry magazines. In the back corner, against the wall, a refrigerator Dad had rescued from a junkyard whirred cold air into its interior.
Grabbing a bottle of tea out of the fridge, Daelia left it open for a moment, letting the cold air wash over her skin. Fall though it was, it was still hot and humid outside, and she’d worked up a sweat on the short drive back.
“I thought he was a Weapons School graduate.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard too.” Daelia pressed the sweating plastic of the bottle against her forehead. Jet engines roared outside. “Is my dad back yet?”
“No,” Raijinn said. “And before you ask, no, he has not told me where he is, either.”
She looked at the kugu. Raijinn was incredibly particular about words. “You know anything about that phone call he got?”
“I do not think I understand your meaning.”
“Never mind,” she grumbled, and downed half the tea in one long gulp.
“Your father does inform me of his schedule. He sent me a note thirteen minutes ago, asking me to double-check the time for his appointment with the press in the morning.”
“Shit,” Daelia groaned. “We have reporters coming by?”
“We have reporters by every year, Daelia. It’s the industry press junket. Normally they spend more time with Tamm and whatever impressive new thing he has brought to display. But there’s always at least a passing interest in Bellona Robotics.”
“I don’t know why,” Daelia said, and looked around. “We’re not the bright light at Ellington anymore.”
“We?” Raijinn inclined the kugu’s head ever so slightly. “Are you going to accept your father’s offer of employment?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I guess you knew?”
“I prepared the documents. A waste of my talents, of course, but your father keeps me underemployed here.”
Daelia didn’t want to talk about this. Didn’t want to talk about anything, just then. She re-capped her tea, shoved it back in the fridge, and grabbed a six-pack of some local microbrew that was in there, still in its carton. “If you see him, tell him I’m up top,” she said, and kicked the door shut again, walking away.
