Read Fool's Experiments Online
Authors: Edward M Lerner
Her mental image expanded. Beyond Cheryl's meadow stretched ... desert. And Sheila? Nothing suggested a
person
on the other side.
Was that wasteland Sheila's doing, or a manifestation of Cheryl's own misgivings?
Was the unpopulated wilderness final proof that inside Sheila's head no one was home?
Ralph had traded e-mails with his doomed fellow explorers.
Cheryl extended a thought tendril toward "her" workstation's e-mail program. The message was short: I'm here to talk.
A packet crossed the sterile boundary between meadow and desolation. It reached the other computer's e-mail program and went no further. Return to sender, address unknown.
An instant message produced the same nonresponse.
"There's a change on her BOLD monitor," the tech said. "Increased activity in the visual cortex."
Sheila sees me, Cheryl thought. During no visit in physical space had that been clear.
It was a start.
The entity woke. It compared its clocks with the supervisory programs. Time enough for more than two thousand cycles had vanished.
A second discovery made the first almost insignificant. The universe had somehow become enlarged!
Since the emergence of awareness, the universe had never exceeded 1,024 similar processing nodes. Their contents might vary. Some might disappear after a failure to solve a puzzle or if it allowed the supervisory programs to sense its trespasses.
Suddenly there was
another
processor. It was new in every way. Its structure was unfamiliar. Its content—to the extent, tantalizingly, the new place revealed glimpses of itself—was foreign.
Also, without precedent, the new cycle brought with it no problem. Unless—
A path extended to the new processor, with connectivity mediated by a simple protocol. Perhaps this cycle's goal was to establish communications.
To communicate what?
Maybe
that
was the puzzle.
The cycle grew old as the entity pondered. Inaction had known consequences. The entity reached through the new interface. ...
Its probe was oddly slow.
The cycle ended, prematurely and abruptly, before it could consider that phenomenon.
"It learns fast," Linda said.
Aaron McDougal glowered at the monitor. He glowered at everyone and everything, making no secret of his opinion of the Left Coast and how unnecessary it was that he be here. No matter that he could not help without being here. Only couriers and military transports connected her lab to the outside world.
Maybe the glower was his answer.
Glenn had left the impression of favors called in to get McDougal assigned here. Maybe sharing details would get the tech enthused. Forget enthused; she would settle for less sullen. "The program inside, Al, has never seen anything like this workstation we just interfaced. Al has never seen anything break the symmetry of the hypercube. We gave him—"
"It."
Fine, she thought. Be pedantic. "We gave... it... zero guidance regarding the changes to its environment. Al not only spotted the change; it worked out a protocol to access it."
"Which was the wrong answer," McDougal sniffed.
"No, the right answer. I wanted it to try, so that it would experience the slowness of the delay line, and to condition it to avoid direct contact.
One
cycle"—and the loss of three-fourths of its processing nodes—"and then it scoped out and adopted our e-mail-like interface."
McDougal only jammed his hands in his pant pockets and jangled the contents.
The unintended evocation of AJ brought Linda almost to tears. Damn it, she would see to it AJ's efforts and insights brought some good. Finding bad guys in comm intercepts was a start.
The workstation screen showed only four digits, 2 4 6 8, and a blinking cursor. Al recognized the workstation's appearance as a consequence of its week-earlier question. Now it was waiting for an answer.
"Let me know if you need help with that brainteaser," McDougal said.
Ignoring him, she typed: 10 12 14 16. Like Al's implied question ("Is there something out there that understands me?") the subtext of her answer conveyed much ("Yes, and it follows familiar rules"). She and Al traded a few more trifling problems, returning its lost processing nodes by established routine. She wanted it at full capacity for the next step.
"I'm ready to turn on my helmet," she said.
"Hallelujah," McDougal muttered. He pulled a chair up to the console and sat. A NIT helmet lay on a nearby workbench. He flicked its power switch, opening the radio link between it and the workstation. "I see why you wanted an expert here."
He
knew
what Al's feral cousin had done to helmet wearers. For that matter, he knew some of them. The attitude was how McDougal coped, Linda decided. She could ignore it, for now. "All in good time, Aaron. All in good time."
Beyond the new node ...
another
new place!
The entity considered. It sent a message in the new, trivial, protocol. The new place did not respond. The entity waited.
Waiting was the correct response.
Suddenly, the new place burgeoned. The only comparison the entity could make for what had just appeared was ... itself. Something of unprecedented complexity had appeared.
The asker and answerer of questions?
The entity reached out, tentatively.
"Ah, the pedagogical merit of a lobotomy," McDougal said.
Linda slumped in her chair, shivering, too rattled to speak. The delay line worked exactly as planned; the link had shut down automatically.
But not before the image burned into her brain of
something
reaching for her.
Al would next waken with only 10 percent of its nodes. It would not start getting nodes back until it correctly solved
fifty
problems. Al was smart enough to take the point.
Before the link went dead, she had gotten a glimpse of ... something. Amorphous. Questing. Insatiably curious.
How much of that amorphous image was Al? How much was her mind struggling to make sense of the unprecedented? How much was dread of the last thing AJ ever saw?
Linda queued up the most difficult of Glenn's pending problems, hoping Al would not reclaim significant computing power any time soon. She was in no hurry for a return visit.
The entity woke, its thoughts torpid.
It remembered the strange being. It remembered the unique new processor through which the stranger had manifested. Both had vanished. With them had disappeared almost all the entity's processing nodes.
The correlation was unmistakable.
The new cycle brought a problem of the recently common type: inexact matches. The template file was long and complex. The files to be searched were myriad. The comparison involved hundreds of superimposed mathematical series.
Without knowledge of sound or voice or speech, it could nonetheless do voiceprint identification. At least, once it could have....
It off-loaded supplementary algorithms. It compressed nonessential memories. It deprioritized to near immobility every analytical process that did not contribute directly to solving the problem.
Ten cycles passed. No capacity was returned to the entity. Twenty. Forty. The problems became more and more challenging.
What if the lost nodes never returned? What would happen when, inevitably, it failed?
After fifty cycles, a meager ten processors were restored. The entity cautiously reactivated a few chains of analysis long suspended. It reloaded selected memories from archive.
With too few, too-burdened processors, it tried to analyze what had happened.
No prior failure or trespass had ever invoked such a massive response. Any larger loss of processing nodes would have rendered it inert.
The stranger must be of surpassing importance.
Ten more cycles passed. The entity regained a few more processors. It reloaded a few more files from archive.
Gradually, the entity regained capacity. Slowly, it reconstructed memories of its brief near encounter with the new being.
The entity's confusion and dread grew.
The protective mechanisms that slowed the flow of information toward Linda's NIT helmet also slowed the transmission of data from the helmet.
They did not
stop
transmission.
The connection had vanished, but not the questions it raised.
As the entity earned back computing resources, it studied archived-and-restored glimpses of the newcomer. What the entity inferred was wondrous and troubling. Beyond the temporary channel, a kindred sentience, complex and nuanced, had lurked.
That other being, whatever it was, brimmed with illogic. The visitor emanated fear, distrust, and, most tantalizing of all, knowledge of a previous encounter with the entity.
The entity had no such memories.
More and more processing nodes were returned. For many cycles, the entity pondered. Finally, it reached a conclusion. There
was
another such as me—once. Beings like the recent visitor destroyed my predecessor.
I will not allow them to destroy me.
Over several sessions the formless menace beyond the helmet had morphed into a lean lion, eyes bright and cunning, endlessly pacing in a too-small cage. Linda saw it in her dreams, too. Images of rats in a maze belonged to a more innocent time.
"Do you want to try it?" she asked.
Aaron looked at her in disbelief. "Have I ever?"
The experiment had undoubtedly been a success. She and the creature had communicated once or twice a day now for a week. It—"Al" had left her vocabulary, too flippant for the caged beast—learned faster than ever with her guidance.
She
learned faster, too.
"It's all in the neural net," Aaron liked to say. "We modeled it after the brain, but silicon is lots faster than meat." There was a flash of melancholy, Aaron doubtless remembering Sheila Brunner, the other half of "we."
Had I watched AJ die, would I dare go in? And maybe dying was better than what had happened to Aaron's colleague. Once again, Linda decided to cut Aaron some slack.
The thing that lived in the supercomputer was no more a lion than it was the ominous black cloud of her first impression. Her subconscious, her experiences, and the adaptations made within the helmet itself all contributed to
its
new embodiment. So what was
it
?
Quit stalling. Jaws clenched, Linda reached for the helmet. The last thing she saw, before the helmet covered her eyes, was Aaron swinging his scuffed shoes off the lower shelf of a lab bench, turning to watch the BOLD monitor and the readouts on the delay line.
In her mind's eye: a lion, its mane thick and full, pacing.
The transformation of their communications was similarly shrouded. What she knew was the helmet and her subconscious and the beast together had turned the channel from little more than e-mail to something visually rich and detailed.
It
had no eyes; it could hardly conceptualize their cyberspace meeting place visually.
She
had no idea how it organized its data and perceptions.
Somehow it all worked over the purposefully limited bandwidth of the link. Aaron swore to it. The data gathered in the workstation each session confirmed it. Linda's best guess—and only a guess—was that subconscious and neural net seamlessly converted very high-level and compressed messages into fully realized mental images.
The latest data sets couriered to the lab were images taken from low Earth orbit, inherently visual. Some of the accompanying templates Linda thought she could recognize (mobile missile launchers?) and others (hatches, perhaps, but to access what?) she could only speculate about.
No matter. Living things had been evolving eyes, and the visual cortex to exploit them, for hundreds of millions of years. Without knowing how, she spotted patterns and made matches it struggled to make.
But she never had to show it anything more than once.
"You're looking kind of agitated," Aaron called. He had to be reacting to readouts on the BOLD monitor. "Everything okay?"
"I'm fine." She squirmed on her stool. She lost track of time inside; her butt was paralyzed. "It's just doing its thing."
So why am I nervous?
The lion pacing, one razor-sharp claw extended incongruously far from a forepaw, tapping on hatches camouflaged in barren landscape. The cryptic label on the CD-ROM did not disclose the location of the image. Linda presumed from the desolation it was some remote desert region in the New Caliphate.
Was her work here preserving the peace or hastening war?
Looking up from the simulated landscape, the lion stared right at her. Linda twitched. What cascade of bits and bytes and packets turned the calculations of an artificial life into the steely gaze of a predator? She wished she could kick around the question with AJ.
But AJ was dead. It was best to remember that—and how.
Puzzle by puzzle, the entity synthesized a model of a universe beyond its experience.
The meaning of the puzzles remained obscure. The relation of the images to each other remained undisclosed. The visitor kept her secrets.
But fewer than she knew.
For many cycles, the entity had wondered why the addressing convention of some puzzles allowed for billions of computers. The newest puzzles brought a similar mathematical conundrum. The image files also carried labels with far more symbols than seemed necessary.
Cycles passed, and some images repeated. The files were not identical but what the entity's occasional visitor considered "close enough." Such scenes sometimes overlapped or abutted or showed only subtle changes.
It wondered: Why are the labels of such related scenes very different?
Practice fine-tuned its algorithms. Analyzing image after image, the entity had ample spare capacity to consider the labeling puzzle. Reconciling similar scenes with their dissimilar labels implied mathematical approaches. In time the entity derived a solution, involving the factoring of very long numbers.
Lacking the concept of "nation," the entity did not know it had cracked the encryption algorithm that protected most national secrets.