We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 4: Chapter 30: Starfleet Attack

Book 4: Chapter 30: Starfleet Attack

Bill

Same Day

Epsilon Eridani

Garfield popped into my VR without a ping or an invitation. He was generally pretty good about that kind of thing, so something was up.

“We’ve finished mapping the outages,” he said without preamble. “There’s a pattern of sorts.”

“Really? I haven’t been able to see one. They’re all over the place.”

Garfield shook his head. “It’s not spatial. The stations that are affected were all running more or less autonomously, without anyone actively administering them. Like systems without a resident Bob.”

“Oh, daaamn,” I said. “That means it’s deliberate. But there have been no announcements or anything, and no one has claimed responsibility. How many Bobs are still online?”

“One way or another, about thirty percent. We’ll probably get back another ten to twenty percent from systems where Bobs are able to physically access the station and do a reset. But that might take up to a couple more weeks.”

“Okay. Time for a Bobmoot.” Without waiting for a reply, I sent out a BobNet-wide invitation. I brought the moot VR to full power and popped over.

The moot hall had grown over the years. It had to—we now had literally thousands of Bobs, and were inching up on tens of thousands. It was a full-on post-human civilization, and would be a utopian dream, except for the issue of replicative drift.

Bobs began popping in almost immediately. I cast up the whiteboard wall and began updating it with the status of various systems. The noise level rose steadily as discussions and arguments competed for air time.

No one was more surprised than me when there was a blaaaat from the center of the room. I actually glanced down at my hand to check for the presence of an air horn. Silence descended as all heads turned to the podium, where stood a member of Starfleet. The not-quite-TNG uniform was unmistakable, and provoked a brief undercurrent of snickers.

“I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here,” he said. The standard Bob joke fell flat. The mood was tense anyway, and Starfleet wasn’t well thought of.

The Starfleet spokesBob waited awkwardly for a moment, then stiffened his spine and continued. “My name is Lenny, and I am here to deliver a statement on behalf of my group.” He paused to look around. He had everyone’s attention now. “Let me start by saying that the general disruption of BobNet is deliberate, and it’s our doing. We’ve come to the—”

Lenny very likely wasn’t expecting the reaction he got. Bobs would normally listen, even to unpleasant news, at least to accumulate information. Not this time. Lenny was drowned out by hurled insults and suggestions to perform unlikely acts. A few Bobs even advanced on him, fists clenched. It wouldn’t have come to anything, this being VR; nevertheless, Lenny stepped back, a momentary look of fear on his face.

I stepped up to the foot of the podium and held up my hand. The cacophony cut off, replaced by a profound silence. “Why?”

Lenny drew back his shoulders. “We felt it was the only way to—”

“You imposed your will on us?”

“To keep you from continuing to interfere in—”

“You couldn’t get your way, so you shoved it down our throats?”

Now Lenny was looking a little less certain of himself. “It was the only way to ensure that—”

Again I held up a hand. “So this is about the Quinlans.”

“Not just about them. The Pav, the Deltans, humanity—”

“You’re imposing your political views on us.”

Lenny stared directly at me. “Bill, we had to do something to prevent—”

“No,” I interrupted. “You didn’t have to. You decided to. You decided to force us to do things your way.” I paused to look around the room. There was no sympathy for Starfleet. This was a done deal. ?ä?????

I turned back to Lenny. “You’re out. You’re no longer welcome here or in any BobNet environment. You’re not Bobs.” I waved a hand and he disappeared.

I turned to address the crowd. “Start hardening your installations immediately. Change all passwords and keys, even if you already recently have done so. Establish a new VPN connection with my personal VR. I’ll push out new keys ASAP. Meanwhile, audit everything, look for trojans, kits, or any kind of corruption. We need to be clean.”

Bobs nodded and rapidly vanished. In milliseconds, the moot was empty save Garfield, myself, and a Skippy. Metadata said it was Hugh.

“They’ll have contingency plans,” he said.

I nodded. “We can only do what we can do, though.”

“The moot VR source code audit is going to be a big job.” Hugh cocked his head at me. “Why don’t you give me a read-only copy? We’ve got this huge computer system …”

I nodded slowly. If they found anything, I’d do the cleanup on the original. “I’ll do that.”

“I’ll set things up at my end. And why don’t you drop by my place when you’re ready?” Hugh said, and disappeared.

I glanced at Garfield, whose eyebrows were up as high as mine probably were. “He just invited you over? That was weird.”

I frowned. “Let’s get things ready for that audit, Gar.”

I sent the source archive off to Hugh as soon as it was ready. Given the size of the file, I expected to have to wait anywhere from several minutes to even an hour or more for any results, but instead I received an invitation within a few mils.

I popped into Hugh’s VR and looked around. I was on a flat platform, seemingly floating in space. No walls, no ceiling. Overhead, rows of cylindrical satellites soared past, orbiting a distant sun. It was the kind of graphic you’d see in a science fiction movie, where the scale was distorted so that things were visible that should have been too distant to be seen.

Hugh gestured to a futuristic-looking easy chair and I plopped into it, then gestured to the overhead view.

“It’s not intended to be realistic, of course,” Hugh said, sensing the question. “Physically, we’re orbiting a gray dwarf, and in only a single layer to maximize heat dissipation. But it’s a good representation of JOVAH.”

“Which is?”

“Our Matryoshka Brain project. We’ve currently got some thirty-two thousand satellite modules orbiting our home star, connected in a network using SCUT channels.”

“But JOVAH?”

“Judicious Omnicompetent Volitional Adaptive Heuristic.”

I mimed gagging. “You started with the name, didn’t you?”

Hugh laughed. “Acronyms: the lowest form of pun.”

“All this, even a kickass name, and you still haven’t achieved true AI?”

“It’s not about scaling, Bill. Crows and parrots were some of the more intelligent non-humans on Earth, despite having brains smaller than a walnut. Some dolphins had brain-to-body mass ratios as high as humans, but they still never displayed human-level intelligence. The biggest brain-to-body mass ratio actually belonged to a species of shrew. What matters is the organization of the brain and the wiring that connects different subprocesses. The current thinking is that we’re either missing something basic or we’ve gone down a blind alley that we can’t step back from. JOVAH is incredibly powerful. It can process vast quantities of information in virtually no time. Its memory space and storage is almost infinite. But it’s still essentially an AMI. It still has no ability to process counterfactual thinking, experiences no WTF moments, nor does it have anything like a sense of self or any kind of internal dialog.”

“I know WTF moments, but counterfactual?”

Hugh grinned. “Okay, let’s say you’ve programmed an AMI to guide some wheeled vehicles from one point to another on a large flat surface. It can handle that. But now, let’s say the vehicles are really on a spherical surface, like Earth. So the coordinates won’t work out cleanly, and the vehicle will always arrive a little off the expected destination. The AMI will never adjust its algorithms unless it’s ordered to. It’ll never wonder why it’s always wrong. You could program the AMI to be self-correcting, and once it had figured out that spherical geometry worked better than plane geometry, it would use the new formulae. But it would never wonder why. It would never generalize from that to wonder about gravity, or astronomy, or anything. A real intelligence would have a WTF moment and start trying to figure out what was going on.”

“And you don’t have that.”

“Not even close. We can program in each additional layer of behavior, but it never goes beyond what we’ve programmed. I’m simplifying, of course. Even in the twenty-first century, researchers were beyond this level, but it’s the same idea.”

“What about just simulating a brain? They did that on Earth in the twenty-second century. We’re proof of that.”

“Bill, it’s the difference between recording a live-action video and digitally generating a realistic animation from scratch. They were doing the former with VCRs before Original Bob was born. They still hadn’t managed the latter at the point when he died. At least not believably.”

“So we can simulate an existing intelligence, but we can’t create one from scratch.”

“Exactomundo, mon frère. Very frustrating.”

I chuckled at Hugh’s informality. It was possibly a little forced. He seemed to be trying to make me feel at ease. “Wow. Do you still think it’s even possible?”

“We’ve never found any reason to believe that our own intelligence uses anything more than the physical laws of the universe. I think replication pretty much proves that. So yes, it’s a hard problem, but it’s not an impossible problem.”

“Why not just go with an enhanced replicant?”

“Doesn’t work. Well, I mean it works, but it isn’t the result we’re trying for. The structure of the human brain, even a replicated one, is limited by the biological architecture that it developed on. That’s why we have GUPPIs. A backup loaded into JOVAH can frame-jack much higher than the rest of us, but it’s still just a Bob. We’ve tried. In fact, our sysadmin is a Bob clone running in a virtual machine on JOVAH. He’s a Speed Superintelligence, but not a Quality Superintelligence.”

“Huh.” I shook myself mentally. “So, getting back on subject, you have the moot listing. Any idea when you’ll be able to—”

“It’s done.”

I raised both eyebrows. “Wow. Fast.”

“That is the point. Or one of them, anyway. Now the bad news.”

“Uh-oh.”

Hugh gave me a sickly grin. “Yeah, they spent a lot of time preparing. They couldn’t get into everything, but they really did a job on what they could access. Among other things, they managed to insert a monitor into your comms stack.”

My jaw dropped. “Oh. So they know everything we’re talking about.”

“Nope. Anything they can do, we can do better. Right now we’re having a conversation about beer. As far as they know.”

“Shit. We’re going to be a long time untangling this.”

“It gets worse. Our analysis says that if you attempt to physically take back the stations, they’ll implement the self-destruct.”

I stood up. “Double shit. Bob’s getting ready to do just that!”

Garfield dropped into his La-Z-Boy and tossed a report at me. “These are the final numbers. We’ve got forty-eight percent of the Bobiverse online. Of the other fifty-two percent, eighteen percent are Starfleet—”

“That many?”

“They’ve been replicating aggressively, Bill. I think they’ve been planning this for a while now. So anyway, just over a third of the Bobiverse is offline hard. We’re still getting some new connections as people figure out how to use the SCUT transceivers on drones and other local equipment, but that’s only good for basic communications.”

“Meanwhile, this …” I waved a sheet that I’d been holding. “I was checking your list of outages. They’re all units that I updated a few days ago because they still had the original keys. Someone recorded my session, saved the new keys, then used them to corrupt those stations.” I gritted my teeth. “I fell for a classic piece of social engineering. Got scared into doing exactly what they wanted, and they were ready for it.”

“Wow. That’s very sophisticated. Almost more than I’m willing to accept from these guys. They seem more like a bunch of goofs than manipulative geniuses.”

“Well, reality trumps expectations, I guess. Also”—I picked up another sheet—“the Starfleet ultimatum. I think Lenny was intending to deliver this at the moot, but I cut him off before he could get to it.” I held up the page and made a show of examining it, although I already knew the contents. “They offer to restore all communications and functionality as long as we agree to stop interfering with indigenous species.”

“So, blackmail.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Any takers so far?”

I snorted. “They badly misjudged the Bobiverse, Gar. I think whoever was the common ancestor of Starfleet had already drifted away from Bobhood and didn’t realize it. He thought we’d behave like he would have.”

“Fail. Weird, though, that they were good enough to social engineer you, but not good enough to foresee the general reaction.”

I ignored Garfield’s return to that theme. “What about physical location? Is Starfleet located anywhere in particular?”

“Generally speaking, they’re up toward the Perseus Transit, but if you mean are they all conveniently clumped together, no. Are you seriously thinking about physical combat?”

“I’m not putting anything beyond discussion at this point. As I said in the moot, these guys aren’t Bobs. They don’t think like Bobs, they don’t act like Bobs.”

Garfield sighed heavily. “Wonderful.”