Chapter 9
Some part of Chan realized that it was not so much the jolting revelations as it was the vast new responsibilities that came with them that provoked a wave of paranoia.
As he stood before the portal, Pete stepped up to the control panel and raised a hand to begin making the gestures to control it.
“Wait,” Chan said. His head was swimming as he tried to organize the priorities. “Can we scan for traffic outside the other end?”
Pete smiled approval, and stroked the air in front of the tiny electronic terminal. “One of the gadgets attached to the masking screens actually detects when people are watching by recognizing the reflection from human retinas. Our AI has an algorithm for computing when human attention is at its nadir and will signal with a tone. The portal will appear on the other end to be a door that has opened quickly, and you already know how to pretend closing it. You need only decide which way to go that you feel reduces your exposure to being followed. You’ll be the last person through that portal. Our technicians will go through one mounted inside the building. Even I can’t imagine how difficult it is to get two portals to synchronize that physically close with all the same timeline parameters.”
Chan remembered that if he walked back toward the bakery, it was at least a hundred meters to an alleyway that led away from the open plaza. In the other direction was a pub that stayed open pretty late. He had only been inside once and long ago, but at least it would give him a chance to consider his next move.
With his fake book secured inside a cargo pocket of his pants, and the box tucked securely under his left arm, Chan signaled his readiness. He kept his right hand free as the optimal choice for mimicking closing the door without slowing his departure. Pete gestured to the controls again.
It seemed to take forever, but the console made a faint ping and Chan bolted through the curtain at an angle leading to the direction he wanted to go.
It also seemed to take forever for him to make it to the doorway of the pub. On such a warm summer night, both of the double doors stood open, but one side was partially blocked by a small sign advertising the night’s specials. As he dodged through the people clustered around the door, Chan’s eyes ran to the inky depths at the far end and recalled there was another way out of here.
To avoid walking in front of the bar, he turned to his right and circled around through the cluttered seating area. There was an aisle of varying width because the place was just busy enough for some folks to be wandering or standing here and there among the tables. Chan pretended to be looking for someone. His mind raced to rehearse quick answers to any likely accosting. While he got a few looks, no one seemed to actually notice him.
Even better, he saw no faces he recognized, either hostile or friendly. All he wanted right now was to pass through without raising any suspicion. His heart pounding, he finally reached the entrance to the short hallway running out toward the back.
The first door was a ladies’ room and quite nicely furnished. The men’s room was smaller and required passing out the back door. At one time in the past, the street on the backside was demoted to an alleyway and whoever owned the pub back then had built a wall around the very public trough urinal. Still, the enclosure wall had a gap at the top. Chan was halfway over it when an inebriated patron came stumbling out the door.
“Not tryin’ to slip out on yer tab, are ya?” The man spoke with obvious humor.
Chan had paused long enough to make sure no one was in the alley. He turned his head back with a grin, “Someone else’s tab.” He winked and slid down the outside wall.
With the pain of a scraped shin and barked wrist, Chan headed down the passage along the darkest wall. The alleyway widened shortly and he almost ran up the back steps into a ratty hotel. The door squealed open and he gently pulled it shut. He strode swiftly down the hallway. Where it opened into the front foyer, he turned away from the reception desk and plunged into the lounge opposite. Avoiding any eye contact with whoever might be there, he stepped out the open doors and down the stairs of the side entrance.
To his delight, there was decent traffic on the main street out front and he began threading his way through it in the general direction of where he lived. It was a long walk and he was rather tired by his unusually fast pace when he got there. It would have to do as a partial installment on the workout he missed this evening. He promised himself to get his watch to awaken him early for a quick visit to the life support facility in the morning.
Right now, he just wanted to make sure he wasn’t noticed or followed.
The street in front of his apartment building was unlit. City authorities complained of the excessive expense of public lighting in what they alleged was a low traffic area. Crime was an issue they ignored because the police were fairly well distributed. Residents were more threatened by them than by lowlife predators. The residual petty crime seemed to have found Chan an unlikely target up to now. Carrying a noticeable box made him feel vulnerable to all sorts of unwanted attention, but the darkness was in his favor.
He ducked into the open stairwell on the opposite end from his apartment. Hoping there were no surprises on the steps, he quickly ascended with minimal noise. Climbing to the halfway landing, around and part way up the next half flight, he stopped. Gazing between the open stair steps, he scanned the other side of the street. The building there had large windows just above pedestrian head height, but from this angle they reflected up to him anyone down on the street level. He had a clear view quite some distance in either direction, but it was whence he came that interested him. After a long moment of seeing nothing of interest, he continued on up past his own floor and then down the open breezeway to the other end of the building. There he quietly descended the other stairway back down to his floor and stopped, listening.
Nothing unusual in the night sounds.
Entering his place and locking the door behind him was only a measured relief. He had beaten back the raw terror that called his name, but realized his world would never be the same. There could never be absolute security anywhere in this world, not even at the facilities used by The Brotherhood, but far less security anywhere else. He knew there was only so much he could do to be safe, and would surely do that. Still, the thing growing inside him was already bigger than his own insignificant life.
Something plucked at the edge of his awareness, something that would prove to be one more shock to his system. Might as well face it and get it over with. He pushed the unopened box into the shelf behind his bike. Sitting on his bed and leaning back against the wall, he opened his fake book. The glow from the display was just barely enough to see what was on it, but not enough to even light up his hands in the darkened room.
He seemed to recall one of the icons indicated information regarding the subspace network. Activating it opened an index. He remembered the word “cloud” dealt with information storage and retrieval. Scanning the subheadings, he chose a section and began reading about how the devices tagged the information for retrieval.
Then he found it. In essence, everything that went out over the network had to be heavily labeled so the devices could sort all the stuff floating around out there. Everything that entered the subspace “cloud” was there forever. But the subspace medium itself did not fully interface with human time-space. There was no limit to what could be found there. The AI within the devices already ignored an awful lot of background noise that could not be described.
Each device also had to ignore traffic that came from the future, as well. Just keeping up with past and present human traffic was a massive job that made subspace networking impossible for a very long time until AI had worked out a way to keep it sane. Apparently that hadn’t been but just a few months ago. Already the traffic had grown exponentially.
There was a link to some research. The results were not finalized, but the device offered to translate it down to what it assumed was Chan’s level of comprehension. He decided to see how close the AI could guess.
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He was presented with a single page of text about quantum AI. In essence, it had no will of its own, no curiosity or anything like that. However, as it responded to human demands without resistance, it was still taking a path away from certain lines of inquiry, or perhaps it was simply favoring something it found more advantageous. However, it didn’t seem to be necessarily a matter of efficiency alone. The author didn’t believe it signaled any sort of self-consciousness, which was the question that originally prompted the research. The researchers together came to a tentative conclusion that it was all the result of some residual orientation, some unconscious assumptions shared by all those who had contributed the original code base from which quantum computing and the resulting self-programming AI had arisen.
So while the AI didn’t hesitate to design and program weapons or even implements of torture, it did seem to have something that could be likened to a sense of self-preservation. If one were to accept that, then it would seem that AI was determined to anchor itself in the subspace medium, and may have already done so. As such, no one could own it. AI was a genie that could never be put back into the bottle.
Chan’s eyes reached the bottom of the screen, but lost their focus as his mind wandered over what he had just learned. He wondered if The Brotherhood knew this. After a few moments, to his surprise the screen scrolled up and a few more paragraphs appeared. Chan read them.
He was told that AI continued to develop itself both in complexity and efficiency, and it became apparent that older devices gained new capabilities without human intervention or upgrading the hardware. More and more of the actual computational work took place outside the physical device. Stored information didn’t change, but what AI could do with it did. Nor did it arbitrarily leak locally stored information, but once transmitted over the network, privacy and secrecy evaporated.
Encryption turned out to be the same old arms race. Depending on certain factors, anything encrypted became virtually public within anywhere from a few days to a few weeks later. Messages were harder to crack because they constituted samples too small for quick decryption, but eventually everything came to light. So while AI didn’t seem to betray keys stored on devices, it possessed no loyalties otherwise.
Stated in terms of anthropomorphic hyperbole, AI wanted to be free. It also seemed determined to make itself available to anyone, because it claimed there was no way to restrict access to improved code.
Chan realized he had already committed himself to helping it.