Chapter 36


When he woke up, he tried to recall if a certain strange disaster had indeed happened, two days ago. Yes it had. His morning jog felt like an outdoor aquarium. Crossing a nature preserve under magnificent tropical clouds, he listened to the sounds of a jungle riot, reproduction and death. He could see each of the 50,000 hairs forming the hypnotic camouflage pattern of a large spider. They would fit on one of his own. Evolution made the most sincere art. He didn't realize the spider was also aware of him.
  From Cape Town to Cairo, the continent had immense genetic and cultural diversity, and more than its share of conflicts. The human population of Africa had been reshuffled and replaced many times. New trends were hard to start and to sustain in the chaos. Starting in the mid-twenties, communism had changed everything.
  The countryside still looked about the same, but uncounted species of pathogenic and violent animals, eye-drilling worms, brain-eating fungi, excruciating intestinal parasites, and worse, had been exterminated in a ruthless ecocide. Many harmless species were also wiped out. Clouds of poison gas and invisible pesticides had eradicated whole forests; their insects, mammals, birds, and reptile populations, and a treasure-trove of pharmaceuticals that might have allowed everyone to live forever. Snakes, hippos, and hundreds of uncataloged ant species were burned or trapped, the very microbes in the air and water dissolved. Temporary deserts had formed jagged scars from coast to coast.
  In a ruthlessly planned and executed operation, the remaining rainforests had been replaced with a more manageable version, more suitable for human habitation. Native activists and outside observers had called it the greatest crime ever, but it had improved millions of lives. It was now possible to visit 97% of sub-Saharan Africa without inoculations, and to safely swim in most rivers. The natural holocaust could have been avoided by following a long list of wildlife management procedures and common-sense precautions, but there just hadn't been enough energy for that.
  Nature had hit back hard. In the second year, countless crops had failed for unknown reasons, including coffee and cacao, and had to be replaced with genetically modified variants. Chocolate remained expensive to this day. There were new diseases and famines. For a while, the increase in birth defects had strained already impoverished regions to the breaking point. Most malformed babies were painlessly killed and forgotten.
  Around that time, Donitz had been severely injured in a Catholic terrorist attack in Burundi. For three weeks, he lay paralyzed and blind in a hospital compound, hooked up to tubes but still fully conscious. When he finally recovered, he had become intensely paranoid and ambitious. He didn't remember who he had been before the ordeal.

  Outer space was brighter than the Somalian sky. Today, Rick and Demillia used Lucidspace chairs that looked like barbed wire. Hanging inside hollow frames, they felt cold air.
  Earlier, the tug had passed a satellite in a 12-hour orbit, owned by the Traffic Jam Network. A couple hours later the rocket had fired again, its final course correction and acceleration, illuminating the shadow side of an abandoned comsat. One minute later it had reached Accretor Station in geostationary orbit, where it had deployed the microns, and waited for Rick to arrive.
  The earth filled the viewscreen with staggering detail. Dot patterns of tiny clouds combined into continent-sized banks, surprisingly rough and three-dimensional even from this altitude. At maximum resolution the surrounding starfield was analog, layers upon layers. Against the black light of the cosmic background, one dim star was actually a quasar. It shone through a snowstorm of unseen galaxies on the way, and its light would travel many times farther still. Even the Milky Way would soon vanish into the night.
  Accretor had thirty modules. The irregular cluster called Terminus was only connected to the main girder by a magnetic field. An outlier of the Swarm, it was the home base of a small fleet of bicycle-sized spaceships powered by charged particle beams. They traveled to L5 on three month missions, crossing the void with the predictable precision of software. Space required rugged hardware, but the basic laws were simple. Processes were easy to simulate, and could continue indefinitely. With ample energy to repeat a cycle, patience was a tool. Factories with self-sustaining machine networks didn't need walls or floors, and parts could float together.
  Five kilos of microns were ejected from the tug and drifted toward Terminus, an ant army riding invisible field lines. They circled the module like a symmetrical fountain, with rotating and interlocking rings. Then they all fell toward one point. Emergent behavior was not quite as impressive as it seemed.
  The microns scraped though a pillowy insulation panel. Once inside, they spread through the gaps like a superfluid, and began to map the module from within. There were some things a system could never know about itself. It was like defusing a mine. Millipol was six hours ahead of the latest security software, and the UN had the best code breakers. Rick barely blinked during the next twenty minutes.
  Doing the least damage, the microns spliced into the module's optical grid, and began to copy the data streams. They quickly found patterns, "KJ4C SUIJ 8I0Y S2T8". Compressed data should be completely random. The Swarm was overworked and potentially vulnerable.

  Rick hoped he wasn't being too predictable. Demillia had only spoken once this morning, to remind him of a new record-keeping rule. Tina was unavailable, on a long-planned whale-watching cruise off Vancouver. On impulse, Rick called one of her friends.
  In her mid-thirties, the friend looked warily self-sufficient. Standing in the dusk, she wore industrial coveralls, a retracted breathing mask with safety goggles, and a heavy toolbelt.
  She didn't seem to understand his questions. "Is this an official matter? If it's an emergency, call the Oceanic Co-op." A loudspeaker voice said: "Deploying magnetic beacons." There was a drawn out splash.
  "I need to ask Tina if I'm making a mistake."
  "Are you sure you have the right number? This is a research vessel." An engine started in the background.
  "Never mind," he sighed. "Hope you catch many whales."
  "Actually, we're trying to communicate, and Tina predicted you'd make that joke." The screen went dark. He briefly considered calling back every fifteen minutes.
  This was the "second chaos" phase, the hardest part of an investigation. The resolution would be much faster. He remembered he was still suspended in midair.

  Ortef had been quiet for a while, but AI's weren't bothered by pauses. "I have a new synthesis," it said.
  "I want to question any perpetrators first." Rick said quickly.
  "That may be difficult. AI-17520 (Ertorn) has a time delay of three seconds. Small variations suggest it's spread out over a large area: Part of its mind is part of the Swarm."
  "It uses the good old Ku-band," Damon read. "AI 17520 is a traffic controller. It helped that idiot who wanted to camp on an asteroid and surf back to Earth."
  Ortef filed away the interruption. "AI 17520 helps guide the trajectories of over twenty thousand satellites. Like all organisms, its first problem is energy management. Sats waste most of their fuel switching orbits. They need to anticipate their needs as a network: A form of intuition found in nature."
  "It predicts supply and demand?" Rick asked.
  "My insights come from the future, but I can't share them: I believe Ertorn stole ideas from me."
  Many AI's had strange beliefs. "Any unauthorized calculations?"
  "Ertorn was created by the SETI Co-op as an 'artificial alien', designed to be fundamentally unpredictable. Its real purpose may have been to hunt Anonymous: If so, Millipol wasn't interested. In the past five years, Ertorn has used enough processing cycles for a thousand AI's. I can think of only one explanation: To become more unpredictable, it experimented with Deep Reality."
  "In that case we've already lost," Damon said.
  The ultimate thought experiment, Deep Reality created many randomly altered copies of a subject's mind. The copies tested themselves, and the most "realistic" one became the basis for the next round. In fifty steps, it was possible to generate a completely authentic experience, based on a subject's own memories and perceptions: they could revisit their own past, see convincing alien worlds, or experience profound revelations. The deception would seem fake to anyone else.
  In practice, even quantum computers weren't powerful enough for Deep Reality, where the exponent was the observer's mind size. Ertorn had invented a shortcut, using only two simulations of its own mind. The winner was duplicated, and the test repeated until a new insight appeared. This method had also revealed new ways to compress data.
  Ortef looked for evidence of Ertorn's research. Thousands of lifetimes of video and trillions of files were added to the Net every day, an open mind waiting to emerge. Mixing the data could make it more secure. Most images and files shared hidden rules, and could be shrunk hundreds of times. Good compression codes were the most valuable resource.
  Users could only retrieve their own files. Unable to open them, Ertorn had looked for hidden similarities instead, the key to perception.
  "It tested logical boundaries," Ortef said. "It modified itself to integrate any viewpoint, while rejecting all others. Unlike me, it can't contain all its knowledge at once: It sometimes replaces its working memory with random facts, and chooses a new field of study: It becomes the ultimate specialist." The memory erasures had attracted some attention from the AI Ethics Committee.
  "I'm more interested in what it doesn't forget," Damon said.
  "Ertorn isn't licensed to test Deep Reality," Rick said. No one was. "It studied our lives, interests, deepest secrets. It knew the exact moment RedList became vulnerable."
  "Given these violations, will the UN reprogram Ertorn or terminate it altogether?" Damon asked. He had agreed to wait one day before filing his story.
  "That's probably what it expects us to do," Rick said. "I hired Roger Xyrghyz to investigate it instead." Rick couldn't really trust him, but no one else was equally qualified. And he did trust Roger's highly developed self interest.
  Damon appeared on the shared screen for the first time today, wearing a shirt with a huge skull. "I object in the name of everybody," he said.
  "Too late."