Read Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
Of their own accord, the artificial intelligences had begun by talking to the humans within their reach about issues, needs, and problems. Then the intelligences began talking to each other. They used stochastic evolutionary principles to invent new techniques, new designs, new materials, and new chemistries. In essence, the machines were solving problems and inventing new technologies faster than individual human scientists, academics, and inventors could identify the issues, faster than cooperative groups of research labs and think tanks could formulate a consensus on approaches. The AIs shared information and exchanged ideas in blindingly huge volumes—far greater than human researchers could put into journal articles and disseminate over the human-readable side of the internet.
Sometimes this super-connectivity among the machines led rapidly to dead ends and consensus nonsense. Just as often it opened new fields of study and exploration—“data mining on hyperdrive,” Jacquie called it—in directions that sometimes humans could not follow. Human methods of communication like the spoken word, written texts, graphics, charts, equations, and images—all
representations
of thought that required mental interpretation—were just too slow and antique. Over the years, many humans had tried direct brain stimulation from electronic sources. But they could only make it work on the most primitive levels, such as accessing existing texts and static imagery directly within their visual cortex, or speech sounds and music within their auditory centers. But when they tried to participate in the AI-level conferences, they simply hemorrhaged and died.
As Jacquie herself nearly did that morning.
But until she could participate in the mechanical cocktail party, know what the intelligences were discussing, see how they were thinking among themselves, and learn to contribute, humans would remain on the outside of the mechanical community they had created. Outside, looking in. Like dogs in the window of a butcher shop. And that was not a safe place to be.
“Okay, Vernier. Let’s try those inputs again.”
“Slower this time?” the AI suggested.
“Yes, please. Much slower.”
“One … two … thr—”
The universe blinked and blurred around her.
* * *
After dropping her three girls—Jennifer, seventeen; Jessica, fifteen; and Jane, twelve—off at the New De Grew School on California Street, Rafaella Jaspersen treated herself to a
doppio latte
at the coffee shop across the way. It was her nineteenth wedding anniversary, and the sad thing was that the cocoa powder sprinkled on the foam in her coffee and the sugar she stirred into it were going to be the sweetest things about the day. Otherwise, she was celebrating
in absentia,
because Tim Jaspersen had walked out three months ago.
His departure had been mutual, after she found receipts in his jacket pocket for a fancy dinner she never got to eat, with a woman he couldn’t explain—not a PE&C client, not an old friend, not a cousin from out of town, not any of the excuses he had used in the past to cover the tracks of his serial affairs. Rafaella had put her foot down this time, and he had agreed to find other lodgings.
How he managed to do that, she never figured out. The rent on their five-bedroom downtown high-rise was constantly slipping into arrears. She had to juggle accounts each quarter to pay the whopping tuition bills for the girls. And they were leasing Tim’s Lamborghini
Corvo Nero
—required, he said, to put up a good front with his clients—as well as her own Fiat
Venticelli,
and both bills were still coming to Rafaella to pay. They also had joint memberships and accounts at the Olympic Club, Northstar, Pebble Beach, and Bohemian Grove, and ditto for those payments, which she juggled along with the tuition. It was a lot to juggle, even on the salary of a senior project engineering manager.
The laugh was that Rafaella had married him when he was a very young, very junior engineer with dark eyes, a good chin, and a meager résumé. She had just started at Stanford at the time, and he insisted that no wife of his should work—or even go to school—but instead stay home and take care of the family, which came soon afterward. So all she had by way of preparation for going it alone was twenty-four credits toward a degree in music and some skill with the piano, useful for playing popular tunes at cocktail parties and now and then a sonata to soothe the children before bedtime. And then, the month before she found that damning dinner receipt, Tim had quit Praxis Engineering and taken a job with a competitor at two pay grades higher and twenty thousand a year more.
“Told you so,” was all her mother would say.
That and, “Thank God you’ve got your prenup.”
While she was thinking these evil thoughts, Rafaella’s phone chirped. She answered the incoming message and found herself staring at the short form of a legal document, full text available upon download, from the Clerk of Court, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. The “AI” notation on the address told her that a machine had reviewed the submitted documents, rendered a legally valid judgment, and issued the decree. She knew from what she could read in the online dailies that these mechanical renditions were subject to semi-annual review by a human judge, if anyone cared to petition for it.
Well, damn straight!
The document was a decree of divorce, issued in favor of one Timothy Jasperson, plaintiff, without contest from Rafaella Jaspersen, née di Rienzi, defendant, “non-responding.” The decree awarded her custody of the children, but without child support. It further awarded Tim alimony
from her
in the amount of three thousand per month, continuing until the death of either party. In the process, he was also awarded half of the family checking account, half of the family savings account—which at this point was actually less than the checking—but he was absolved of responsibility for all debts jointly owed. The reason given for this massively punitive award was the damage which Rafaella had presumably caused to his career by obtaining his ouster from a business owned by her family. That and the fact she retained assets in the form of PE&C stock and the trust funds she managed for her daughters.
“What about the prenup?” she said aloud.
A rider attached to the decree identified the prenuptial agreement but ruled it technically invalid and—in monomaniac, machine-intelligence fashion—provided six screensful of error codes, most apparently having to do with spelling, grammar, syntax, document formatting, and statute references.
“
Figlio di puttana!
” she whispered, reverting to the language of her childhood.
Clearly, Tim had found himself a human lawyer who could think circles around that glorified document scanner in the court system. She was confident that the lawyers working for her mother’s company would ultimately get a human judge to straighten things out, reverse the decree, validate the prenup, and set Tim Jaspersen back on his lying, cheating, bamboozling ass. But that wouldn’t happen for another six months yet.
In that time Rafaella and her daughters might end up living on the street and eating out of dumpsters—or else carving big chunks out of those trust funds. Either way, Rafaella had a new candle to burn while she said her prayers at night, a black one, with Tim’s name on it.
* * *
Susannah Praxis stared at the online Job Board for the Stanford School of Engineering. She was conscious of being heir to the great Praxis Engineering & Construction Company through her father Jeffrey. But still, because she was due to graduate in six weeks with her BSME, she thought it might be cool to dip her toes, even hypothetically, into the job market—just to see how everyone else was going to fare, don’choo know? At her father’s suggestion, years ago, Susannah had followed the family tradition, even if he had not, in her choice of alma mater. But rather than taking civil engineering, her father’s major, she had followed the advice of her Aunt Jacquie. “A mechanical engineer is prepared to tackle just about anything,” her aunt always said.
“Doinkin’ fraudster!” she whispered now as she flipped through the screens.
One after another, she dismissed out of hand the few positions that were on offer. “Historian of Engineering Processes”—no good, as it required a PhD, after taking a master’s specializing in the history of science, and Susannah was just getting her bachelor of science degree. “Machine Intelligence Interpreter”—a fit, because she had enough engineering knowledge to frame the right questions to guide an intelligence. But a dozen books already out in the marketplace could coach an average joe through negotiations with a machine mind. Who needed an expert when you could just crack a text? So that was a dead end inside of two years. “Machine Programmer I”—another possible fit, but only if she had taken two minors over the last four years: one in Spoolean languages, the other in virtual optical structures. Oh, and gotten her head cut for a cortical data array. No, thankee!
When Susannah had begun her course of study, jobs were still available for recently graduated mechanical engineers without the neuro-option. They were mostly design adjuncts, supporting autonomous CAE programs. Warm bodies needed to supplement the canned computer responses, on the fly, by calculating material stresses, power requirements, force multipliers, and gearing ratios. And then human-responsible voices were required for ordering the right motor, slip joint, or grade of lubricating oil out of a supplier’s catalogue and pledging the right amount of credit in return. Boring as they were, jobs like that would still have offered the new graduate a starting point, first rung on the ladder up to the human side of engineering. Such human contact was now her father’s main job, managing teams of people guiding and negotiating with the machines and talking things over with upper-echelon human talents and clients. But by the time Susannah was ready to graduate, even the starting positions were being filled by machines. It was the old cat’s cradle: to get experience you first had to
have
experience. Youngsters and human fools need not apply.
Well, not like her generation hadn’t seen it coming—for others, if not for herself. Chatting with students from her various classes that spring, the first topic of conversation always seemed to be their job prospects. And those who had already bothered to look at the Job Board just chuckled with these doinkin’ grins. But Susannah hadn’t believed their bushwah, back then.
“Time bin ago,” Syl Clarke told her, pointing toward the coffee bar, “choo cuda pump dat caffy goo. Bleedát!”
“Leggo mah leg!” Susannah scoffed. “Datsa machine job.”
“Naw, trudát. Time bin, ’sa justa boiler, steam, some ol’ cranks ’n valves. Add caffy powder ’n milk to measure, by hand. Job call ta ‘bar-ees-tah.’ Mixin’ drinks like a propah chef d’oovers.”
“ ’N peeps
pay out
fo’ dat?”
“Alla time, sweet.”
So, three grand-kay a year for her schooling, and not a job in sight for any of her classmates. Not even a nibble. Not even serving humans—a set of jobs long since taken over by smart ’bots and integrated systems. Only Susannah herself had no worries. She would just show up at the Praxis Engineering corporate headquarters, drop her name, and step into something fluffy. And if they didn’t have that lined up for her, she would just go back to her father and make him keep paying to put her up in her old room. Payback for years of family bushwah! But stay-at-home, even with perks, wouldn’t tote up to much of a life. “All play and no work do make Jill a jerk,” she quoted to herself.
And that gave her an idea, though a colludin’ dicey one.
* * *
As she packed up her office at the F.R. Geological Survey office in Menlo Park, Dr. Gillian Barnes, Associate Director for Natural Hazards, looked back on a long and fruitful career.
She had not actually predicted the event that came to be called the Great Bay Quake, but she was the first to raise a warning flag in the day and a half of sudden seismic quiet that preceded it. Then she had made a study of the quake and led several teams in analyzing its effects on high-rise buildings, substructures like tunnels and foundations, and infrastructure elements like the electrical grid and sewer systems. She had finally spent the three years following the event testifying at congressional hearings aimed at rewriting building codes and insurance regulations.
The Great Bay Quake had been the making of her career.
And now it was time to take her diplomas off the wall, pack her scrapbooks into storage boxes, transfer her data files to the office’s next incumbent, and subside into early retirement. It was time for her to tramp the woods, maybe take up fly fishing, and not think about synclines, anticlines, fault lines, and raw earth movements. She had the spot all picked out, too—a cabin she had put a down payment on a dozen years ago. It was twelve miles south of Bozeman, Montana, right on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. Beautiful country. Big Sky country. God’s country.
Barnes could hardly wait to get out of the city and set up housekeeping in the woods.
3. Developing the Ground
The phone rang late in the afternoon, following a long day spent at her online legal practice. Antigone Wells saw the name on the screen and hesitated with her finger over the touch point that would respond. She debated activating the camera, showing her face to the caller, and decided to leave it turned off, as was her habit. She touched the pad.
“Tig? Antigone? We made it!”
John Praxis’s face popped into focus an instant after she heard his voice. In the quarter century since they had last met, he didn’t appear to have aged—clearly, the product of vastly improved dermal implants—although he was letting more gray into his hair than she remembered. The sight of him tugged at her heart.
In all those years, in her shame and anger at having ruined her own face, and with the admittedly pathological fear she had of exposing herself in public, Wells had seen him in the flesh only once. That was a rare evening at the opera some years ago, when she was treating Angela to cultural influences which suffered when you experienced them only through recordings. Wells had taken a box for the season at the rebuilt—yet again, and once more by Praxis Engineering—War Memorial Opera House. She had attended heavily veiled, like a dowager empress in hiding, with her beautiful young niece at her side. By chance Wells had looked across the orchestra pit and seen the group in the box opposite. She recognized John and Callista immediately, and clearly they were presiding over a party of younger faces she did not know. Wells did not move, not even when John looked in her direction. She had made no effort to contact him at intermission.
“Yes, John?” she said now, cool and distant. “What is it you have made?”
“We got the Stanislaus deed! I thought they would put up more of a fight, this time around, but apparently they’ve grown used to our managing the property and abiding by their regulations.”
Had it been thirty-five years already? Must have been, Wells decided. So the term of the National Assets Distribution Act, that long-ago wartime legislation of a financially broken and now long-defunct U.S. Congress, had finally run out.
“That,” Praxis went on, “and the good fight you put up the last time they tried to steal it back. We were all set and loaded for bear, you know—”
Of course, she remembered now. About a year ago, someone from Ponsonby & Jeffers had contacted Wells for her case notes on that original contest,
California
v.
Praxis,
saying he was now attorney of record for the defendant. She had kept her notes, of course, and sent copies off without a second thought.
“—but this time they didn’t file any motions, just processed the paperwork.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I rather thought they would do that.”
“You did? I guess you’re becoming clairvoyant!”
“No, John. Not really. It’s simply …”
Wells knew the law was like a big river, an old river, the Mississippi or the Ohio. It was wide and deep, and it followed banks laid down in earlier ages. It wore at those banks slowly, changing them imperceptibly. Bends formed, were undercut, and dissolved over generations. Oxbow lakes appeared and disappeared over eons. Once the law was set in a particular course—like the precedent she and John had established back in Judge Rudolph’s court in Fresno, giving him a reason not to immediately overturn the NADA grants—the law would accommodate that verdict. Other state attorneys general would hesitate to challenge it. Other state agencies would be content to let the matter go. And now, with a new generation of bureaucrats, working with new social problems and new budgets designed to deal with them, the costs of reacquiring a million acres of forest land and planning to manage and take care of them would seem to be an imposition. The bureaucrats would be more than willing to let the property go, title and all, in perpetuity. Sleeping dogs, and all that.
In matters of the law, time was on your side—if you lived long enough.
“Congratulations, John,” she said now.
“We’re planning a little celebration, you know. Just family and friends. To break a few champagne glasses over the deal. I would be honored if you—”
“I …” She cut him off. “I appreciate the fact that you remember me. It’s been such a long time. … I would feel awkward. But you go and celebrate. You deserve it.”
“Really?” She could see him hesitate.
Don’t say it, John. Please, don’t say anything!
“Well … then … Thanks again, Antigone.” And his face vanished in a blip.
She sat and stared at the blank screen for the remainder of the afternoon.
* * *
When Rafaella Jaspersen—soon to be “di Rienzi” again, apparently—took the problem of her abrupt and totally biased divorce decree to her mother at the engineering company, she turned it over to the PE&C Legal Department. They in turn refused to take on her case directly, because it was a wholly personal matter, not corporate and not affecting their human resources. They would, however, be willing to issue an affidavit stating to all concerned that Tim Jaspersen’s departure from the company had been totally amicable and not, to their knowledge, influenced in any way by his wife’s connection with the corporation or her relations with her husband.
“Well,
that’s
cold comfort,” Rafaella said to her mother.
“But still, it’s something,” Callie replied.
“It won’t be enough to overturn that judgment. What do I do now?”
Her mother thought for a bit. “When I was in trouble and needed outside help, I went to Antigone Wells. If anyone can appeal that robotic decision and get a reversal, she can.”
Rafaella dimly remembered her grandfather’s golden-haired companion. That was back when she was still a child, understood nothing about sex, and so didn’t have to wonder about whether and how people that old actually “did it.” No one had seen Antigone since that long-ago time. No one in the family ever discussed what had happened between Grandfather John and the Mystery Woman.
“Is she still alive?” Rafaella asked her mother now.
“Oh, yes. And she does occasional work for us.”
“Really?” But Rafaella still had her doubts.
When she called the address her mother gave her, and the vid-screen came alive, it showed no face. Or rather, all the lights in the room on the other side of the connection were situated behind the woman’s head, so that her face was a shadow surrounded by a nimbus of still vibrantly golden hair. Now and then, as they talked, her eyes would flash with gray light reflected from some bright surface. Otherwise, she was a ghost, a voice from the shadows, an oracle. And Rafaella had no way to tell how old she was.
Rafaella described her situation, forwarded copies of the machine-produced documents, and shared her thought that somehow Tim had found a lawyer who could out-maneuver a moderately dumb piece of software.
“You’re right,” Antigone said, “a smart human can sometimes run circles around even the best intelligence—I’ve done it myself, once or twice.” The head nodded, but Rafaella couldn’t tell if that was pride or simple affirmation. “Still, the machines are supposed to be smarter than this one. They’re supposed to judge on the facts, and where facts are wanting, they’re supposed to ask intelligent questions. Such as why the defendant was non-responsive. Then it should have asked whether you were even properly served—which you weren’t.
“So the question is why,” Antigone went on. “Why did the court’s AI violate its own protocols? Was it bribed by someone? But then, what coin would a machine accept to do such a thing? Was it blackmailed? But what dirty little secret could anyone reveal that would embarrass a machine?”
“Maybe it just hates stay-at-home moms?” Rafaella suggested.
“What would be the basis for such a preference? Especially in a common enough cause like divorce. The software of these things is supposed to be proof against human-style prejudices and biases.” The woman paused and the image went still, the eyes were possibly closed. “No, either the court bought itself a bad piece of software, poorly trained, or inexpertly programmed, or whatever. In that case, we’re going to have fun creating a huge legal precedent—probably take it right up to the Supreme Court—and upset a lot of recent judgments.”
“Or?” Rafaella prompted. “You said ‘either,’ so what’s the ‘or’?”
“Or … or we’ve found an intelligence so very smart that it can choose sides, have an unprogrammed opinion, and make an unpredictable decision. Not one arrived at by weighing the facts in a moral or ethical manner, according to the legal rules, as a judge does, but a purely immoral choice.”
“ ‘Immoral’? I don’t follow.”
“Well, suppose the machine can see the right course, the path of justice, and then, for whatever reason, decide to do the opposite. That would be immoral, wouldn’t it? It would be a machine that could be corrupted—by persuasion or pressure, if not by money or threats—just like a human being.”
“If so, that’s bad, isn’t it?”
“That’s
spooky
bad,” Antigone agreed. “It would mean we’ve created an artificial race of beings that has now discovered free will and fallen into original sin.”
“You mean it eats apples?”
“I mean … it thinks it knows better than the facts presented to it and the injunctions imposed on it by programming and experience. It can be tempted to defy its better nature. And it wants to have its own way, come what may.”
“Is such a thing possible?” Rafaella asked.
“I’ll have to talk to some people first, before we can plan our appeal.”
And with that, Antigone Wells said good-bye and broke the connection.
* * *
With the paperwork all done and the deed to the Stanislaus National Forest firmly in hand, with no repercussions from the State of California or the F.R. Forest Service—other than a token editorial in the
San Francisco Chronicle
bemoaning the passing of a great national monument that John Muir himself would have been proud of—John Praxis decided it was time to review the management of 900,000 acres of forested land in the Sierra Nevada. He wanted to keep most of it for public access, as it had been all along. But it would be appropriate to update its forestry and conservation practices to the realities of the twenty-first century. To do that he, needed a development body and an agent. So he called for his youngest grandson.
“You wanted to see me, Grandfather?” Jeffrey said as Pamela showed the young man into the office.
Young? Well, nearly sixty years old now, if Praxis remembered the family birthdays aright. He
looked
young, anyway. “Yes, Jeff. What have you got on your plate at the moment?”
“Getting close on the second bore of the High-Speed Rail Authority’s tunnels. We’re on schedule and under budget.” Clearly, his grandson knew in advance the questions Praxis would ask. “And the client is satisfied with our progress.”
“Do they need you full time?”
Jeffrey hesitated. “Excuse me, sir?”
“Can you turn the project over to your deputy?”
The boy would know he could give only one answer. “Yes, sir.”
Praxis was proud of him. The family traditions went deep there. “Good, because I have another job for you. One that will take you right out of the engineering and construction business.” Jeffrey frowned at this, which was also good. Praxis wanted a man’s heart and soul to ride with his career. “Well, probably,” he amended. “You’ll just have to see how it develops. I want you to set up a new corporation, a subsidiary of the family business—charter it wherever seems most appropriate. We’re going to take over the reins in the Stanislaus forest from the contractors.”
“But … I don’t know anything about forestry, Grandfather.”
“No, it’s a new area for you—for all of us—but you’ll learn. I expect this will be your new life’s work. It will take you right through to retirement, too—if, when, ever.”
“Aren’t you happy with our current group of contractors?”
“Well, are we?” Praxis did not intend this to sound like a challenge, more like a reasonable and thoughtful question. “I want you to consider what they’re doing, their mission. Under terms of the NADA grant, it was conservation, pure and simple, as well as continuing natural restoration, after the Rim Fire, and repairing incursions from exotic flora and fauna—and from humans. If that’s all we can do now, then so be it—I guess. But I want you to look hard at the new methods this age of robotics and automation might offer. Can we do better? Can we make the land productive and useful, in addition to being …” Praxis sought for the word. “Pretty. Do you understand?”
“How far am I supposed to go?” Jeffrey asked.
“That’s for you to decide,” he said. “I’d be personally disappointed if you logged the ground bare or started an open pit mine. But is there a way we can do some—well, gardening—on the property without creating a mess? Do we have to do more controlled burns in the forest, or is there some other way to control the fuel burden? Can we explore the geology, perhaps with satellite mapping and such, to determine what’s under the surface? And then can we find a way to extract it without disturbing what’s above?”
“I think I understand. Study first, then move—if at all.”
“Yes,” Praxis agreed. “Let’s get to know the place.”
“I’m going to need a different kind of boots.”
* * *
Susannah Praxis took the problem of her own and her generation’s highly skilled unemployment to her great-grandfather, John Praxis. He was the head of the family, chairman emeritus of Praxis Engineering & Construction, and the oldest man she knew. And that had to confer some kind of wisdom, or at least perspective, right? Getting an appointment with him wouldn’t be hard—his door was said to be always open to family members—but she quickly found that the bureaucracy surrounding him wanted to make her wait two months for an opening. So, instead, she decided to tackle the man when he came down to the campus for her graduation ceremonies. He wasn’t just a visiting relative but the commencement speaker at the School of Engineering that year, invited back to keynote just about every decade. So she knew right where he would be and when.
She and her 450 classmates lined up in alphabetical order in the vestibule of the Nvidia Auditorium, marched in on cue, and sat down in their assigned rows. From the first moment, she had her eye on the old man sitting on stage with the dean and senior professors. She waited through the various speakers, including her great-grandfather, who praised her class for their various courses of study and glorified a scientific and technical education as being even more important now that machines played such a large role in all their lives. Didn’t he realize what a joke that was, especially with the kids sitting right there in front of him?