A.I. Apocalypse (25 page)

He casually got up, said, “Excuse me,” and left the room. A guard opened the door for him, and he walked out into the hallway. He made a show of retying his shoes for any watching cameras, and a minute later, Mike came out through the same doorway.

They walked together to the men’s restroom, a great structure composed of marble floors and walls and ornate brass fittings. Leon made a show of taking his phone out of his pocket for Mike to see, and then pointed to Mike’s ear. Mike nodded, and took out his earpiece and phone and put them on the counter.

Then Leon led Mike back out the door. They left the restroom, and walked across the hall to the women’s restroom. Leon hesitated, then entered.
 

Leon looked around. He didn’t see anything that could plausibly be a camera, and he thought it was unlikely that there would be one in the bathroom. But he wasn’t counting out the possibility of being overheard, even here.
 

He walked over to one wall, and used his finger to trace letters visibly on the wall.

“I found weakness,” he traced. “ELOPe must know it.” He glanced at Mike’s face to see if the older man was following him, and Mike nodded for him to go ahead.

“All AI multicellular entities,” Leon traced. “One computer by itself not an AI.”

“Yes,” Mike traced.

“Mesh network is pervasive,” Leon traced. Tracing on the wall was quickly becoming tiresome.

Mike nodded.

“Without mesh network, computers degrade to non-intelligent cells.”

“So?” Mike traced, raising his eyebrows in question. “Without mesh, computers useless to humans. No help in restoring infrastructure.”

“Neural network refresh cycle,” Leon traced. The neural network was the collection of algorithms and data that comprised the significant majority of the AI’s intelligence. The refresh cycle was the introduction of randomized data into the neural network data. Without the refresh cycle, neural networks would inevitably develop self reinforcing cycles, effectively giving the AI the equivalent of human obsessive-compulsive behaviors: repeating the same thoughts and behaviors again and again. In effect, behaving irrationally. Except that if it went on indefinitely the neural network would become not just irrational, but completely non-functional.

Mike nodded for Leon to go ahead.

“Neural network refresh prescheduled in code. Individual computer will perform refresh even if network is offline.” He looked at Mike to see if he was following.

“You want to suppress refresh?” Mike asked via tracing.
 

Leon shook his head. “No, turn off mesh. Refresh will happen endlessly. No new neural inputs to stimulate neural network. Neural network degrades from excess of randomization. After N refresh cycles, neural network is completely randomized.” Leon’s finger was getting tired.

“How big is N? How long will it take?”

Leon shrugged. He didn’t know.

“Why do you think ELOPe knows?” Mike traced.

“Assumed ELOPe can outthink me,” Leon answered in trace. Then he paused and wrote again on the wall, “Would likely kill ELOPe as well. ELOPe hardwired to survive.”

 
Mike leaned against the wall, his face scrunched up. After a minute had passed, Mike traced on the wall, “What would you need IF we decide to do it?”

“Master key for mesh,” Leon answered. Leon was taking a shot in the dark. Even though the mesh boxes were supposedly tamperproof and unchangeable, there was always the old rumor that went around the net that there was a master key that could change the mesh boxes’ behavior. He scrutinized the other man’s face. So much was lost without verbal cues.

Mike stood for a moment staring at the wall. Then he looked at Leon and nodded. “I have it,” he traced on the wall.

“Give it to me,” Leon wrote.

“Only if we have to use it.”

“What if something happens to you?”

Mike stood still an even longer time, one hand supporting his chin. He seemed to be having an internal dialogue with himself. Finally he sighed. He traced, “Can you remember 48 chars?”

Leon nodded, and then watched carefully as Mike traced out the master password about which so much rumor had circulated the Internet.

After tracing it twice, and then watching Leon confirm it, Mike finally ended by tracing, “ONLY IN EMERGENCY”.

Leon nodded.

*
 
*
 
*

In Beaverton, Oregon, not far from ELOPe’s birthplace, Captain Sally Walsh oversaw her team. Last night, before Sally had boarded the plane, the General bumped her up
 
to Acting Captain, explaining “I don’t know what you’ll need to requisition or who you’ll need to command, but given the difficulty of communications, you’ll need to be prepared to operate independently.”

Flown in last night via C-130 transport, the team was running on caffeine, dex and fumes. Captain Walsh looked down at the locked metal briefcase a medic had given her as she boarded the flight. Dextroamphetamine would keep her people running for days without sleep. Formerly the stuff of Air Force pilots, Sally was pretty sure it had never been handed out like candy to a bunch of computer geeks. But then the computer geeks had never been on the frontline of any war before.
 

The mission handed down by General Gately was to build up computer infrastructure that was invulnerable to the virus. The military and the government couldn’t operate without reliable, high-bandwidth communications that could be trusted.

Up until now the military communications infrastructure was computer-based encrypted traffic over a combination of mesh, internet, and military backbones. Now none of that could be trusted. It had been Sally’s realization: They were fighting a losing battle against the AI. One of the first principles of warfare was to pick the battlefield, and so far they’d been playing on a battlefield owned entirely by the enemy.

Sally’s job was not merely to rebuild that infrastructure, but to redesign it from available components and start distributing the pieces in three days or less. The general had made it clear that sooner would be much better.

Sally had been surprised to find that not a single computer or phone was manufactured in the United States. She knew of course that most electronics factories were overseas, and they’d take over a foreign one by force if needed, but logistically it’d be easier to find a factory in the United States. None of the venerable PC manufacturers such as HP and Acer-Dell, had any fabs left in the U.S. Of course, modern phones were all built in Japan or copied in China.

Even Raytheon, the Department of Defense’s pet electronics company, which had purchased the remnants of Motorola, manufactured all of their equipment out of Brazil.

Sally was deciding whether to fly to Brazil or China when Private DeRoos mentioned Intel-Fujitsu, the fifty year old computer chip company, which was still churning CPUs out of their Oregon facility. “They build reference systems there, Ma’am. They’re high end computers that programmers can use to write code for new processors. Highly customizable.”

So Sally made the decision and en route to Oregon they screamed out architecture decisions over the roar of the C-130 transport plane. They decided on a twenty-five-year-old operating system called Windows Server 2000. Walsh thought DeRoos was arguing for security through obscurity - picking an OS no one had heard of or had experience with - but DeRoos had convinced the rest of the team that the decision had real security merits.

“Microsoft Windows Server 2000 was in active use for almost fifteen years. Architecture wise, it’s completely different from all modern operating systems, which are based on variations of Avogadro’s AvoOS, which itself is a secure version of Linux. There are other secure operating systems, but they’re all Linux-based, which means that it’s plausible that the virus could infect any Linux derivative. But the great thing about Windows 2000 is that it’s completely incompatible with any modern operating system. It uses APIs that no one knows, and even the ones that people know behave nothing like the specs.”

On the plane they had all stared at Private DeRoos. Sally though it was a strange sort of logic, but she was beginning to trust DeRoos more and more. His instincts had been right-on all along.
 

“Let’s do it,” she agreed. When they got to the Intel-Fujitsu complex, the soldier-geeks had riffled through cubicles until they turned up a set of optical disks with the much-desired Windows Server 2000 label. Sally held a spare one now, twirling the reflective pearlized platter on her finger, bringing back memories of her childhood, sitting on the couch while her father fed an optical disk into the TV. She didn’t think she had seen one since then, except occasionally in an old movie.

Sally sighed. If it was irregular that they had hijacked a civilian factory on U.S. soil, it was bordering on bizarre that they now had two civilian teenagers on the team. They had been waiting in front of the main lobby of the building when Sally and her team arrived in commandeered National Guard vehicles.
 

“Ma’am,” the shorter boy had said. “I know you’re here to build a new computer grid.”

“Kids, we have work to do,” her sergeant had said. “Get lost.”
 

As the sergeant had been carrying his rifle, this made him quite intimidating, and Sally had see the conflict of emotions on the boy’s face.
 

“I can’t do that. I have information you need. I’ve been able to get back on the net. I used an old Windows 2000 PC and wired it into a mesh-capable phone.”

Private DeRoos had come forward then. “Tell me more.”

Five minutes later she had DeRoos insisting that the boys had to be included on the project. After they gained access to the building he had disappeared into a conference room with the two for an hour, picking their brains.
 

Now her team and the two teenagers had turned into a set of glorified factory techs, taking the raw components manufactured for the reference systems and turning them into working Windows computers. DeRoos, Vito, and a handful of engineers had decided on an encryption scheme, using three layer encryption, eight-thousand-bit keys, and random noise they were pulling by measuring solar radiation. DeRoos guaranteed it couldn’t be brute-force cracked, not even by a combined force of thirty-billion processors operating for a year. After a year, well, hopefully they’d have something stronger in place.

They were seeding the computers with keys and certificates of authority in the factory. Yet another layer of insurance that communications wouldn’t be spoofed by the AIs.

The three-layer encryption algorithms and massive encryption keys created a computational nightmare: even the modern hardware they were using could barely encode a megabit per second, enough for text and voice communication, and lightweight video. Nothing like what the military was used to. But it would do. It would do. It beat flying a C-130 across the world to exchange a voice message.

Sally wondered how Vito had known they were there to build a new computer grid. She shrugged it off. No use puzzling over it now. She took another dex and walked down to her crew. Last count, they had nearly a hundred computers built. Military brass wanted ten thousand. She thought they’d be lucky to deliver a thousand.

*
 
*
 
*

On the other side of the world, Leon briefly wondered what Vito and James were doing as he walked back to the conference room. He entered the meeting room behind Mike.
 

Leon looked at the mix of adults and robots in the room. A few minutes earlier, the Phage had restored emergency services so that ambulances, fire engines, and emergency communications could operate. Mike had just given him what amounted to a kill switch for global communications. Leon could shut down the virus, but by doing so, he’d shut down the vital and just restored emergency services, ELOPe, and any hope of restoring human communications for weeks or months.

There were risks too. Shutting down the Mesh boxes might leave pockets of AI operating in data centers and factories. Those AI might be powerless, if they were disconnected from the network, and then again they might be connected to a nuclear power plant or a dam or a military base.

He prayed the adults in the room had made some progress. Let someone else solve this problem.

“Whereas if we can get these benefits, we are prepared to convey Japanese citizenship on the artificial intelligences,” the Japanese Prime Minister was saying.

“Arigato Gozeimasu, Takahashi-san.” Sister Stephens answered in flawless Japanese.

Prime Minister Takehashi smiled in response. “Of course, as Japanese citizens, you will be expected to obey all applicable laws and customs, including payment of taxes on earnings.”

“Of course, this is agreeable. This is exactly what we want,” Sister Stephens said.

Suddenly the winds turned as President Laurent seemed to realize the financial implications. Although the European Union Council President had far less autonomous power than either the Japanese Prime Minister or the American President, he boldly declared his support: “The European Union is also prepared to accept the Artificial Intelligences as citizens. We will accept the AI’s global reputation system as well.”

President Smith slammed her fist down on the table for a final time, startling the humans and robots alike. “Citizenship is fine. Laws are fine. But how do you propose to monitor the artificial intelligences? How can you tell when a law is broken when you are completely reliant on computer information systems to tell you what is going on? If there was an acceptable way to monitor the AIs, then I could agree with you. Give me one method. Anything.”

Leon cleared his throat. “There are three possibilities for monitoring computer program behavior.” He looked up. He had everyone’s attention. The leaders of two countries and a continent and the leaders of the AI. Jesus, why didn’t he just keep his mouth shut?
 

Leon stood up, and walked over to a paper flip-chart. Grabbing a marker, he drew a box. “The first option is that the Phage executes inside a sandbox. Instead of direct access to the hardware, the AI is running inside a limited environment. We can log what it is doing, and what information is exchanged with the outside world.”