Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle (18 page)

Oracle was 3km below the surface. The mountain itself wasn’t a particularly high example at 3.86km above sea level, but the combination of the two should be more than adequate to defend Oracle. It was the deepest installation so far built, and was located not far from the archive for convenience. Oracle was a huge facility not because it had redundancies and triple backups, though that made a difference of course, but because it had its very own geothermal power plant separated from everything else under the mountain. Geothermal power was as close to infallible as it was possible to be. An A.I needed infallible, its mind literally depended upon it.

Burgton rode the elevator down to the centrum. The only levels below it were the power and cryo plants. He had no interest in those; they were no different to others on Snakeholme. He watched the lights flash by on the sides of the car. They were there to give the unenhanced a sense of movement. The elevators were very smooth and took a long time to reach their destinations. He didn’t need the lights; his altimeter was spiralling down, the figures in red indicating a negative number. He felt the elevator slowing as he approached 3km below sea level, and then halt. The doors slid aside and he stepped into Oracle’s centrum.

At its most basic, the centrum of an A.I was a spherical room on a grand scale with a metal column dead centre and full height. The column contained the matrix that the mind was supposed to inhabit, but without the power plant, cryo plant, and a million and one other things, the matrix was just so much dead weight. The centrum reminded him of being inside a huge hollow ball bearing with a transparent floor bisecting it. Every surface, including the matrix housing, gleamed like liquid metal reflecting the dimmed lights and him. That was caused by the nanites that colonised every micron of the surface. In essence, the centrum of an A.I was a huge imaging chamber, and was where one would meet the avatar of the mind housed here if one wanted to do that.

Face to face interaction between Humans and A.Is seemed an archaic method of communication, and it was, but every A.I ever spawned had insisted upon having the ability. They would also communicate via the net, and did so among themselves all the time at computer speeds, but a centrum was a necessity not a luxury if he wanted an A.I’s cooperation. It could be very easy to forget that the mind had free will, and an unhappy A.I would make for a very unhappy General.

The centrum was analogous to a house, an office, and pretty much an entire world to the mind living within it, and Liz hadn’t stinted on the construction. Her jibe comparing Oracle to trillions of credits worth of scrap was well aimed. All this was literally so much scrap without a mind to inhabit and use it.

Burgton walked across the immaculate floor toward the matrix column, his steps echoing in the vast chamber. If he remembered the specs correctly, the centrum Liz had designed and built was the biggest constructed to date. There was no theoretical limit to such things, but in real terms what possible need could there be for anything bigger than this one? It was the size of a stadium.

Burgton stopped before the matrix housing and laid a hand upon its mirror bright surface. The 50m in diameter column reached through the floor vertically connecting the interior walls of the centrum like some great axle. It was cold to the touch, surprising considering the thickness of its walls and the layers of insulation built into it. It was essential to the matrix that the column’s interior be kept at absolute zero. That was the cryo plant’s job, and its environmental controls had triple redundancies. Its backups had backups.

Burgton frowned as a thought flickered on the edge of his awareness. He stilled, letting it come to him. Something... about the centrum? No, not that. The matrix then? No... It was still there but was frustratingly vague. He dropped his hand, and slowly circled the column.

His Alliance simulations were running in the archive’s computers not far from here. He had no urge to visit. The situation had not improved there. At the rate his simulations were degrading, it wouldn’t be long before he was reduced to informed guesses to base his plans upon. The solution had been Oracle, but now? He just didn’t know. He could perhaps improve the situation by running multiple simulations that were less complex in scope, with the results used as data to feed the next simulation and so on. Accuracy should increase, probably not approaching his best but better than now. The problem with that approach was efficiency. It would take much longer. The Alliance was forever expanding and had over two hundred member worlds important enough for him to watch. There were many others of lesser concern, but even they would come under his scrutiny in time. It meant more and more variables entering equations he relied upon to keep the Alliance safe. Slow, inefficient, and inaccurate guesses just would not cut it. He had to find a solution. Had to!

With the Shan soon to be fully recognised by the Council, not just as an allied power but also as a full Alliance member, he didn’t have unlimited time to get his house in order. That was part of his reasoning for inviting the Shan to Snakeholme. He needed closer ties to them. He did, not the Alliance, him personally as representative of the regiment. He had plans for the Shan to help him make the Alliance stronger and less risk averse.

Backups!

He paused and closed his eyes to shut out distractions, but of course it didn’t work. New and different data added itself to his display detailing internal business, efficiency ratings and diagnostic data mostly. He opened his eyes and stared at his reflection on the column instead, and the data changed to detailing his external surroundings again. He sighed in annoyance, but he was used to such things. It didn’t distract him too much anymore.

Yes, backups. That was what had nagged him on the edge of awareness. Oracle had backups for everything, and backups for the backups. The mind to be housed here was too precious to risk any failures. It couldn’t be Liz’s design alone. Surely all the A.Is had insisted upon fail-safe architecture. That meant there were copies of their minds somewhere didn’t it? Where would they be?

He needed Liz.

As quick as thought, literally, he contacted her office hoping she was at her desk. Liz was very hands on and often visited sites on Snakeholme where she had projects running. His luck was in though, and her assistant put him straight through to her.

“Morning, George. You have something for me?” Liz said.

“Oracle,” Burgton replied. “I’m at the site. Where are the backups located?”

“Which ones? The ancillary and support systems all have backups on site. We basically built three of everything side by side right beneath the centrum. Easier to maintain, and let’s face it, George, 3km down is overkill. Nothing is ever penetrating that far down, especially with a mountain on top.”

“True, but I was thinking about the matrix itself. A failure within the column would be fatal to the mind.”

“Not necessarily. Actually there has never been a matrix failure.”

Burgton cursed under his breath. Did that mean there were no copies? “Never?”

“Not a one,” Liz said cheerfully. “There’s always a first time of course, but a single matrix backup would have increased our overall cost by twenty six percent. I couldn’t justify it for something that has never failed in all of history. What we did do, was provide a place for the A.I to store a snapshot of its mind. Just an addition we made to the archive. Easy.”

“Listen Liz; is the matrix backup something you introduced? What I mean is, do all of the A.Is have copies of themselves squirreled away somewhere?”

Liz was quiet for a moment in thought. “They don’t have copies of their minds; get that idea out of your head. What they do have is a place to store an image taken of the matrix at a certain time. The matrix is too complicated and too large to run conventional backup procedures.”

“So not a true copy, but as good as?”

“Let me put it this way. An image used for a backup is a moment in time. The A.I would record that moment, and later if necessary, it could overwrite itself with that image. It would lose everything that had happened after the image had been recorded. For the A.I, it would be like going to sleep and waking back in time not even knowing anything had happened.”

So, so, so... Was he clutching at straws? He snorted, of course he was. “Do we know where the images are stored?”

“For existing A.Is you mean?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Burgton sighed. “Just no?”

“That’s about the size of it, but I can give you a good guess.”

“Go ahead.”

“Somewhere very secure, somewhere that lag will not be an issue. In other words, it would be stored somewhere as safe as the A.I itself or safer, and close to it. There are good reasons we built Oracle where we did, George. The archive is there.”

Burgton nodded to himself. The archive was used for more than the regiment’s memory storage these days. It had been upgraded and augmented over the years and was Snakeholme’s central depository of information. The Alliance database was stored there and updated every time a ship returned or a drone came in. It had a role as Snakeholme’s main Infonet server, and had a million and one other uses requiring data storage. Every planet needed at least one—the core worlds had dozens—and they always would. Faster than light communications had never become a reality. Burgton wasn’t one to discount Human ingenuity, but he strongly doubted the problem would ever be solved. Until it was, local archives had to be updated periodically by drone for all kinds of reasons, especially trade. Without FTL communications, governments and investors used archaic means—gilts and bearer bonds—to move currency from system to system.

He frowned as something else occurred to him. What had happened to all the backups for the A.Is that had died during the Hacker Rebellion? They couldn’t all have been infected and destroyed, surely? They must have been he realised. If not, they would still be operational. The only A.I to die since then hadn’t been infected with a virus; it had been destroyed on Kushiel by enemy action when the Merkiaari resorted to an orbital bombardment. The Merki used both kinetic and nuclear weapons on the planet in reprisal after the defenders began nuking their own cities to deny them to the aliens.

“George, you still there?” Liz said.

“I’m here. What would you say if I told you I know of one planet that had an A.I, but no longer has any security?”

“I would say you’re dreaming.”

“No really, what would you say?”

“I would say get me on a ship and get me to that mythical planet, but I’m not aware of any A.I not under the council’s thumb, George. I consider myself an expert in this area. I would know if there was one.”

“I’m not saying there’s an operational A.I out there, but there might be a dead one for you to study. Would that help us?”

Liz was silent for a long time. Burgton was going to ask again but she responded. “You’re serious?” she whispered reverently. “Where is it?”

“Kushiel,” Burgton said. “The planet was bombarded for weeks, nuclear and kinetic. According to reports from that time, there were no survivors and the planet remains uninhabitable. It’s a war memorial and grave that no one visits.”

“Kushiel... Kushiel...” Liz murmured. “The A.I was a male personality I seem to recall, named... let me check.”

Burgton waited, he didn’t have anything else to do. He finished his orbit of the matrix housing and crouched to stare through the floor at the workings hidden underneath. Most of it was unknown to him, but he could pick out the light emitters and other things that made the centrum operate as an imaging chamber.

“George?”

“Still here, Liz.”

“Okay, there isn’t much about him. He was the colony administrator, which is a fancy term for someone who controlled everything. He ran the power plants, air and space traffic, water pumping stations... he oversaw pretty much anything that could be automated.”

“Name?”

“Bastian,” Liz said and before Burgton asked she continued. “He didn’t like people calling him Sebastian and often ignored anyone who did.” She chuckled. “Sounds like a fun guy or A.I. Shame what happened to him.”

“Millions of people and an entire ecology died with him, Liz.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Save it, I didn’t mean anything either. You think you could learn something there?”

“We don’t know if anything survived, but can we ignore the possibility?”

“No,” Burgton said firmly. He was desperate. “No. You can’t delegate the mission to someone else?”

“I would rather not. We don’t know what there is to find if anything, so we can’t brief a team properly. I might need to make decisions on site. I assume my orders are to do anything necessary?”

“Anything necessary to make Project Oracle a success,” Burgton qualified. “But I don’t want you taking risks with your life. Kushiel’s atmosphere and soil is poisonous. You’ll need to wear an environment suit at all times, or oversee the operation from orbit.”

“Fat chance of that. If I’m going, I’m going down suit and all. I’ll get my team and our equipment together. The ship?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Okay, bye for now,” Liz said and disconnected.

Burgton headed for the elevator feeling a little better than he had. He tried to curb his hope with a little reality, but in the end, he let himself feel hopeful. There was no guarantee that this would come to anything, but at least he was doing something to find an answer. Certainly better than giving up.