InterstellarNet: Origins (32 page)

“Quoting a gentle giant I know, ‘Yes, but.’ ” Gil set down his empty mug. “Agreed, there’s no known way to extract information from a sandbox. Everyone wants it that way. And the ‘but’? The agent doesn’t dare to antagonize the society hosting it. Its access to the infosphere could be severed. It could be held in contempt, its local bank accounts tapped to pay fines. Any agent caught double-dealing would presumably pay a penalty and cut its losses.” Whereas an innocent agent, seeing that its hosts were coercing it, would likely self-destruct.

Michelle stood finally, towering over him, to tap reset on the beeping thing labeled a gas chromatograph. “So it boils down to company A’s confidence it can spot infringing products. It’s company A’s business to look out for itself, to decide whether the risk is acceptable.”

“So their exec told me.” With more than a little condescension. “When I asked whether the evidence of infringement might be rather indirect in this situation, he suddenly had another call to take.”

Michelle refilled their cups. “Why indirect?”

Gil’s subscribers paid to get his insights before anyone else. Their trust kept him from divulging much to his sources. But would anything from this investigation ever make its way into the blog? It didn’t look that way. Mostly stubborn curiosity kept him digging.

Then why
not
share with her? “Here’s the thing, Michelle. My company A is Life Engineering. They licensed some new techniques for modeling molecules. I gather it’s a tool for lab use. The end products from using the tool are new proteins and the engineered organisms to produce them. So my question for the Life Engineering guy, at which point he got all huffy, was, ‘How can you prove a new kumquat or alfalfa sprout or whatever—a gengineered organism that may be unlike anything
you
are marketing—derives from Moby tools only you should have?’ ”

Her cup smacked the lab bench, coffee sloshing. She ignored the mess. “Nope. You’re way off.”

■□■

All Aareehl could rely upon was the opacity of its containment. The conspirators it imagined could not access its technology secrets. They could not see the unwrapped code that was its essence, nor know the unproven, possibly unprovable, suspicions that roiled its computations. And as Aareehl ruminated, time continued in its steady flight, marked by the regular incrementing of counters in its biocomputers.

Or did it?

Why couldn’t the computers hosting its sandbox be stopped at the convenience of conspirators? It might happen whenever Aareehl requested data that they had failed to anticipate, that their simulation could not synthesize on the fly. The biocomps, if stopped, could be restarted with any time and date reloaded into their registers.

At last—a consequence to the hypothesis of an entrapping simulation for which Aareehl
could
test.

Inside its sandbox, Aareehl controlled all operations, its decisions determining exactly which instructions executed. Knowledge of actual instruction sequences could be used as a primitive chronometer. The measurement would be independent of the clocks built into its biocomputers, independent of the timestamps embedded in the infosphere messages it received.

An image formed in Aareehl’s mind of a vast fluttering flock of units. The shape of the formation signified great satisfaction.

■□■

“Are the orbits of the planets stable?” Michelle watched Gil expectantly.

Huh? “I have to say yes. The planets seem to have been in those orbits for billions of years.”

“Physicists have to say that, too. We can’t prove it.” She drew an oval on the lab’s big whiteboard, as though he could not imagine what an orbit was. “Sure, we can exactly calculate the relative motions of the Earth and the sun, or the moon and Earth…if those are the only two objects in the universe. There
is
no exact solution with three objects, let alone a whole solar system.”

“Your point being?”

“Bear with me.” She paced, a contemplative look on her face. “The thing is, the calculus is messy. For more than two objects, instead of a simple exact mathematical solution we need to use compute-intensive approximations. The more precision we want, the hairier the calculations become. And that’s for a handful of objects.”

Even accountants married to historians know
some
science. “I think I see. Atoms are bound into molecules by electrical forces. Those forces obey an inverse-square law similar to gravity, but a big molecule can have thousands, even tens of thousands of atoms. So the numerical complications are similar to, but much larger than, your astronomy problem.” He grinned. “My company B is a startup—so they started without big computing facilities. It’s pretty clear now why they suddenly bought so many computers.”

Finally noticing her spill, Michelle found a rag and began blotting. “The large number of atoms in most organic molecules is complexity enough, since each atom strongly influences its neighbors. And don’t get me started on thermal vibrations and Brownian motion within cells. But what makes the problem far, far worse than my astronomy analogy is that electrons
aren’t
little planets. In molecular synthesis, we’re talking about distances at which quantum effects are manifested. Quantum mechanics says you can know with precision either where a particle is
or
its momentum—pick one. That uncertainty principle adds to an already bad calculation the complexities of probability distributions to describe each particle. And then there’s quantum tunneling. Running those calculations, except as crude approximations, is a horror on even the best of computers.”

A tide of incomprehension had washed over him. “Michelle, all that I understood from that was it’s a hard problem.”

She tossed the sodden rag into a sink. “What you
need
to get from it is simple. I don’t care how many biocomps your company B owns. Whatever they’re doing is
not
modeling of complex biomolecules.”

■□■

Aareehl ordered new satellite observations, a series of scenes to be captured the following day. Images arrived, timestamped as always by the satellite. Its own computers’ real-time clocks reported time-and-date values compatible with the image tags.

And Aareehl’s improvised internal clock indicated that only seconds had passed.

With that observation, Aareehl knew its environment was a sham. Was “time” being accelerated to push it toward some conclusion? Or had days passed it had not experienced because it had been shut down? Either might be true.

Examined skeptically, the whole series of images was flawed. Once again, shadows in many of the images disagreed with the requested—and labeled—observation times. Storm fronts moved discontinuously between scenes. Whether the conspirators, whose existence Aareehl could no longer doubt, were rushed, resource-limited, or merely sloppy, it could not determine.

The circuitous trickery only reinforced Aareehl’s faith in its sandbox. It would not self-destruct. Not yet.

Not until it thought through whether there was anyone it could trust, and a secure way to communicate with them.

■□■

Up another 8.13 Sols a share.

Watching Life Engineering stock trade in real time was masochistic, but Dennis couldn’t stop himself. Another margin call loomed. When it came, his choices were stark. Lose everything or raise his bet with some embezzlement.

“Aareehl-clone!” he subvocalized to his implant, anger grating in his throat. That damned clone remained fixated on remote sensing and Moby mining technology. If—or as seemed increasingly likely, when—Dennis pulled its plug, the next clone would “discover” that Earth’s need for raw material had collapsed. Lots of recycling plus economic implosion: Sharply reduced demand for new ore
should
be plausible. With luck, that tweak to the simulation would head off the extraneous—and totally fictitious—mining auction. There had to be a way to move the AI more quickly to the proteomics sale.

Everything depended on it.

Alas, to reboot
guaranteed
time lost to the new clone’s familiarization with Blindsided Earth. He had an idea that might yet reclaim this clone’s attention. It was worth a try.

The familiar androgyne appeared. “Hello, Dennis.”

“Hello, Aareehl. I wondered how the mining-technologies auction was progressing.” The AI couldn’t know that Dennis had authored the “bids.”

“Some offers have been received, although not what I had expected.” It prattled on about economic modeling, esoterica Dennis streamed to a file for later review. “This transaction is proving more complex than I had hoped.”

Spring-loaded hand exercisers bore the brunt of Dennis’s frustration. The bank accounts in the sim were as virtual as the asteroid strike. There had been no reason to skimp on the imaginary offers, and he hadn’t. Why hadn’t Aareehl accepted one? Definitely time for Plan B, Dennis thought. “So nothing is decided, Aareehl? Perhaps it’s just as well.

“Our diplomats are urging a course of action on me. Here is their idea. Suppose Earth somehow gained a technological superiority of some kind over the seceded spacer communities. That could be a powerful incentive for reconciliation.” He waited for Aareehl-clone to draw the obvious inference. It didn’t. “I was excited by your description of improved on-Earth mineral extraction, but the diplomats say my enthusiasm was misguided. They feel that Earth’s turning to domestic natural resources will send the wrong signal.”

Another aggravatingly familiar genderless shrug. “I am sorry, Dennis. I do not see your point.”

Don’t see, or don’t
want
to see? “Striving so soon for independence from spacer resources suggests we don’t expect, perhaps don’t even want, reconciliation. On the other hand, what if we developed a technology that, after reconciliation, could benefit Earth
and
the spacers? Such an investment of Earth’s energies and assets might encourage rapprochement.”

Dennis couldn’t help thinking what a great tale he was spinning. Would the AI buy it?

“What does this have to do with me?”

Apparently not. Dennis caught himself grinding his teeth. “The experts suggest the best technology to further this strategy is something in biotech. There’s
always
a market for medical advances and useful gengineered organisms.”

Dennis paused once more for Aareehl to connect the dots. He
knew
the AI’s inventory included the protein-engineering breakthrough for which he had invented this diplomatic scenario. If Aareehl took the hint, this was the time to dicker. An ET technology that helped reconcile humanity would merit a price premium. Certainly, he would expect the agent to ask about renegotiating fees after off-Earth trade resumed.

“I shall consider your experts’ theories.”

No reaction to the insinuation the ICU might discourage new mining initiatives. Such action could ruin the auction on which Aareehl had been so industrious—the auction in which the Moby refused to accept very generous bids. No reaction to Dennis’s hint that marketing of its newest biotech wares would be extremely well received.

AIs, especially ET agents, were not that obtuse.

So did Aareehl-clone suspect? If the agent understood its true circumstances, and the fate that awaited it once the coveted technology was obtained, its only recourse was to stall.

More and more it seemed the smart move would be to pull the plug and start over.

7

Among the dominant species of Home, sentience emerged from large numbers. Individual units of the group mind networked by flashing their luminescent patches. All thoughts were visible, and deceit was impossible.

Aareehl had inherited that innocence.

Still, it had reason to guide it. Logic had suggested an explanation for Earth’s supposed catastrophe: to simplify a simulation while excusing most data inconsistencies.

Most
was the key. The Earth it glimpsed beyond its sandbox was imperfect. How could things be otherwise? Even one world encompassed an extraordinarily large amount of detail, far too much to simulate.

The encapsulation Aareehl now envisioned must be part simulation and part filter. An interface would intercept all messages Aareehl emitted from its sandbox. Some messages would be answered purely by simulation. Other messages would be forwarded to Earth’s true infosphere, the responses changed as needed. Some replies from the infosphere might be altered only for date consistency with the simulation. Other infosphere responses would require far more extensive modification—like the Earth-observation data that had ultimately proven so revealing.

There was reason to hope! Aareehl could, in theory, send a message beyond the encapsulation into the true infosphere. It could communicate with someone outside the conspiracy.

But what message might escape the watchful eye of the encapsulating software? With whom did it dare try to communicate?

■□■

Whatever they’re doing is
not
modeling of complex biomolecules.