Baby Steps
A rogue A.I. programme muses upon humanity's value
LIEUTENANT MILES NOAH WAS just inside central bunker when the NCO caught him. “Lieutenant, this way please.”
She whisked him through an airless corridor of concrete and steel, past the milling curiosity of Hopkins from Logistics, and Rogers and Obi from Engineering. Each one nodded, clearly relieved this was his mission, and not theirs. After all, his combat experience was wider, and his understanding of self-sacrifice, greater.
His escort ushered him into Colonel Lopez’s office before abandoning him to the scent of furniture polish and ocean salt aftershave. Lopez’s computer screen added an alien glow to his dark skin, diverting Noah’s interest in this leapfrogged chain of command. Lopez barely glanced up. “You’ve read the briefing?”
“Yes, Colonel; it’s Nam, a New Model 340. Classification: Top Secret. She’s designed to test algorithms for neural responses to battle-ready simulations. Three days ago, without warning, she locked down all exits. Messages from HQ suggest they’re unaware.”
Lopez nodded. “We’ve sent out a few ‘Is Wolfie ok?’ messages. The responses confirm that Nam’s intercepting all traffic. Which brings us into unchartered territory. Nam was never programmed to cover security or communications. And three days is a long time to figure out whether she’s playing tic-tac-toe with all our bilateral agreements.”
His eyes returned to his screen. “You’ve done some programming at Oxford; extensive peace-keeping duties in Cyprus, DRC, and South Sudan. You’re exceptional at problem solving.”
Noah nodded. “Affirmative, sir.” He even had the obligatory marriage at tipping point, with a wife getting ready to file for divorce. “What do you want Nam to do?”
“We want her to restore comms and open the damn door, Lieutenant. She’s installed sensors all over the place, but we can’t tell if she’s evolving or disintegrating. Could she be sharing classified data with other A.I?”
“Not with any sentient understanding, sir.” Noah could hear his grandmother, Myra, laughing. As a Professor of Ethics at Oxford, she’d guinea-pigged her lectures on him throughout his adolescence. She’d certainly have had one for this scenario. “Has Nam requested any specific information?”
“Can’t tell. So far, we’ve sent two teams in. They came out petrified and incoherent, wanting their families. Hopefully, you’ll have better luck going in solo.”
Translation: We’re not going to risk the whole damn unit having a nervous breakdown. You’re up, soldier.
Noah nodded. “Hopefully, sir.”
He wasn’t sure what NAM had done to the place, but it was certainly more than rearrange the furniture. Or perhaps that was a stipulation carried out by human hands. The ambiance would have been all her design though.
His first impression on entering the room was that he had stepped into snow blindness. He had no reference for an all-white environment. Even in the Arctic Circle or a snowstorm, his vision had been broken with subtle hints of colour. The white became a blanket of red, blue, yellow, green, purple, all environmentally disturbing. When he finally saw Earth’s night sky, filled with moon and stars, his heartbeat soothed out again.
Something forced him into a seated position. He sat comfortably in darkness, pulled back into a childhood at Buxton’s Dreamtime Multiplex, watching Galaxy Marauders and giggling with friends, the security of his grandmother seated directly behind. Here in the present, he could smell salted popcorn, taste watered down Coke-Pepsi syrup, and hear the tense rustling of snacks someone had smuggled in. Comforting smells. Heat, sun, his grandmother.
On the screen facing him, words appeared in glowing neon white. Images scrolled slowly, reviewing a history currently being animated by A.I. technology. Above each one was a query.
You? Tell. Why?
Noah frowned. NM340 was programmed for verbal, formulated sentences. Could her source code be corrupted?
Why?
Nam threw up an image, then brought each one to life with 32K simulation. Miles skittered back as the air around him gave out a single word.
What?
This image was of a girl of six or seven, a living child, her head in the jaws of an alligator. Her dark eyes and expression were fatalistic. This is what happened. What she expected. Crocodile baiting using children. This was better than being alive with the monsters who were taking pictures. This was an antebellum period where lives were owned.
Nam threw up another image.
What?
England. A ten-year-old boy, very pale, hanged for a loaf of bread, the trapdoor falling away, legs juddering, then finally silent and immobile. Somewhere else in the world, another boy of a much darker skin tone, standing on a soapbox, about to be hanged. He was surrounded by men, dressed in soldiers uniform, a photo shown, period and context debated. British Empire: the nadir of Western Civilisation. Reason for hanging: Parental quota of harvesting not met. The child himself a footnote in that debate.
Reason?
He saw a woman, Scottish, burned alive in her Highlands cottage so that landowners could raise sheep. Nam showed more records, once the banner of conquest, today the definition of barbarism.
The payment for scalps showing the success in the drive to exterminate First Americans. In India, children blinded so they would raise more money from tourists. In Columbia, among spiralling crim, the poor, homeless, even children, treated as los desechables ‘the disposables’. Executed with impunity by military death squads and vigilantes. He saw human beings, small , tall, bearded, disabled. Children kept in cages and paraded for entertainment. He saw skins being ironed while on live bodies.
How the hell had he missed this history? Was there something that had crawled under the skin of all human oppressors that took them to a unique level of savagery?
Recorded. Maintained. Reason?
Nam repeated this question, even though he hadn’t answered any of the others. What was the interest here? Inside his head his grandmother’s voice provided a therapeutic salve to his trembling psyche. He repeated her words. “We learn. We sacrifice. We change. It’s our history. Our tradition.”
Tradition?
Humans he realised, had very little to say for the atrocities they inflicted upon each other. More images scrolled. In China, baby girls were thrown out with the trash, or in Saudi Arabia, buried alive. The binding of feet, toes broken and bent under to keep them small and beautiful to emulate a ‘graceful’ shuffle.
Young girls, still living, being burnt with their dead husbands. Little girls and boys trafficked away from families to satisfy aging libidos. The marriage of girls to dogs and pigs; girls of families handed over to avenge wrongs. In Rwanda, a woman thrown into the river with her four children, one strapped to each limb. Women with skills in herbs and saving lives tied to witching stools or burnt at the stake as witches. He hadn’t realised so many of the fallen were women.
The questions continued.
What? History? Kill?
In response, he conjured up rituals of birth, life, death, marriage and all the rites of passage in between. And in between was nothing but the smell of blood. He saw shackles. Scaffolds. Guillotines. Gibbets. Firing squads. Burning stakes. Millions dying and dead of starvation while the food they grew was shipped overseas to feed orations about ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ And in between, the endless fallen in forgotten wars. He would not be sick, but his stomach roiled as the images sped by.
Say why? History? Honour?
Myra would have forced a debate. Gagging silently, he tried his best. “All these deaths have led to change for the better. To progress.”
Should we kill you? To make more progress?
He sat up. Wait a minute. Now, wait just a …
Was Nam exhibiting anger? Was she angry?
No, that was impossible. He breathed in, thinking hard.
Nam was a neural programme, that was now showing clear expanding network connectivity. He was a soldier, alone in a room with A.I. that seemed to be growing rapidly in sentience and sapience. The sudden, familiar chuckle at his shoulder was dry. Myra, his grandmother. He could hear her deep, melodic voice coming over his shoulder. How about this, Miles?
Lieutenant Miles Noah grasped the bone his grandmother threw him, cracked it open, and sucked the marrow from every syllable he’d ever heard her utter.
In the main area, activity was bustling towards the now open exits. Lopez was quietly jubilant. “You deactivated it, Lieutenant, excellent work! So, what did Nam really want?”
Questions answered the right way,” was all he said.
The truth was more sinister. But would telling them change the trajectory of their research, deals, conflicts, and warmongering? But should he tell Lopez the truth? That the robots were probing, seeking a way? That wasn’t paranoia. Logic had showed them that humankind thought little of its own species.
Throughout history, lives had been thrown away like yesterday’s trash. Unwanted, uncared for, unvalued, forgotten. Sapient, sentient AI might not see the planet the way humans did. They wouldn’t require the same things. They might be symbiotic not extractive. Or it might simply a matter of removing those things deemed irrelevant. No. NAM was right. She was looking for a rationale and a motive for the extermination of all humanity.
But the truth was too frightening to speak aloud. Instead, he said, “Nam was exploring ethical frameworks. She wanted to learn about the things we’d forgotten.”
“Good man. Get everything in your report for the debriefing. Good work.”
He could see Lopez’s relief at having one soldier back out and in still his right mind. The Colonel was going to put this to bed quickly and quietly. “Thank you, sir.”
Now dismissed, Noah walked away. After the fuss had died down, he would put in a request an honourable discharge. They owed him. And if he left now, he could drop by to say hello to his grandmother, and be home in time to try and save a marriage.
Word count: 1596
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