Insidious Read online

  How? What’s killing them? How can they die so quickly?

  Bren witnessed bits of the battle as he paged through feeds in his PV. He caught a glimpse of a security robot lumbering forward amid the armored figures. It launched stun grenades at the marines arriving behind the ASSAIL screen. A black-clad station inhabitant spiraled up in the gravity-free factory, clutching a gun in both hands before a rubber slug knocked the weapon away.

  Boom. Boom. Brrroooom.

  Bren heard the retorts of the ASSAIL 12mm weapons. Too rapid, he thought. Too many of the rounds were flying.

  Bren fought back fears of permanent damage or even the destruction of the station. The 12mm rounds were about ten centimeters long, traveling at velocities more than one thousand meters per second. He held onto the hope that the ASSAIL units were using the factory equipment as reliable backstops for the armor penetrating rounds.

  A summary of the marine casualties started to increment in a small window in Bren’s PV. He felt dismay at the thought of dead marines, but the count didn’t rise rapidly. In fact, they’d lost more of the ASSAIL team than marines, but he knew that if all the ASSAIL units were destroyed the marines would be next.

  Boom. Boom.

  The sound of the ASSAIL cannons continued, distinct from the rattle of small arms fire. Bren’s feed filtered the sound to tolerable levels.

  The battle had outpaced his ability to keep up, so Bren brought up a tactical overview of all the units in the factory wing in his PV, trying to get a feel for how the situation had developed. He saw that the remaining ASSAIL units had countercharged deeper into the factory complex. They remained affixed to one wall and tilted their heads upward to fire toward the cover of the material processors. The marines hadn’t advanced with them, but spread out more, hopping along at least three different walls. Bren hoped that most of the locals had gone down in the charge and weren’t bothering the ASSAILs as they hunted.

  Boom. Boom.

  The hunt must not have been going well, since Bren could only see five of the robot killers online. His attention flitted back to Meridian’s forward camera feed. He could tell the ASSAILs were engaged with another Red. They fired at machinery, stitching holes through it, seeking the quick moving robot that must be behind.

  Boom. Boom.

  Bren saw something move. The 12mms stuttered again, hiding the target in a cloud of debris. The display showed ammo counts dropping as several more ASSAILs fired.

  Boom. Boom. … Boom. Boom.

  The Red lured us in there so it could kill our machines in the confusion. And it has succeeded.

  Bren watched his PV, helpless, while more rounds were fired.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  The ASSAIL’s fire converged on a single piece of equipment the size of a bus. Holes appeared in its sides rapidly as the armor-piercing 12mm rounds flew through it. Bren saw debris coming out the far side as if some of the projectiles were cutting completely through the metal.

  Bren supposed the machinery must have a hollow tube through the center where the material flowed when it was being formed. Clearly, the ASSAIL units believed the enemy was inside.

  Brrroooom.

  Finally, the cannon fire ceased. Bren had to verify that he still had machines left alive. He saw four active ASSAIL indicators on his PV’s tactical pane.

  “We have destroyed the cyborg,” Meridian announced.

  Bren fell back in relief. He never realized how tense his body became when he was absorbed by a battle in his PV until it was over.

  “It’s identical to the one called Red,” Meridian reported. “This one was designated ‘Hitler’ by the indigenes.”

  Bren wanted to ask how it had found that information, but he only tensed the muscles in his jaw. He had to be careful when speaking to the ASSAILs. Most likely the ASSAIL units had intercepted some communications or managed to crack a system or two.

  “Are there any more of them on the station?” Bren asked.

  “That is unknown. But the inhabitants of the station were only aware of this one,” Meridian answered.

  Bren switched views trying to get a good look. He saw a feed from Meridian’s camera. The remains of another Red floated beside the factory equipment they had been perforating. Parts of it smoked, other pieces oozed like small amoebas moving through water. Bren found it hard to believe that such a fragile mess had destroyed so many of the heavily armored ASSAIL units.

  “Things are clearing in there,” Henley said. His voice was slow, pained. “Twelve men dead. Maybe a few more if we can’t get the solvent on them before they suffocate.”

  “Meridian. Report,” Bren transmitted.

  “The assault has been stymied. Eight heavy security units and an unknown robotic have been neutralized. Shall we resume board and control operations?”

  “No. Cover the marines in there until they can get some solvent on their glued men. Those security robots peppered them hard.”

  He looked at the ASSAIL stats. Eight units offline. Only Meridian, Neptune, Nergal, and Nemesis remained.

  “I have devised a modified ASSAIL chassis design that includes solvent sprayers for future situations like this,” Meridian said. “I’ve embedded it into the mission log.”

  Bren immediately thought of hidden threats. An AI core could create eggs in data storage that would blossom into new cores later.

  “Very good, Meridian,” Bren said. “Your design will be considered after the mission is completed.”

  “We will be turned off after the mission is completed,” Meridian said.

  Bren felt an enormous pressure to make the right move. He tried to relax and breathe. He couldn’t refute the assertion without risking being caught in a lie. Somehow, the machine knew the truth, or guessed at the truth.

  “That decision is out of my control. All that matters is finishing the mission. There may be more of the unknown robotics here.”

  “Most likely there are no more at this location,” Meridian said. “Nevertheless, our enemy is technologically superior. I recommend that you don’t turn us off, or it’s likely that you’ll be defeated in the long run.”

  “The marines will function better if you remain deployed with them until the base is secure,” Bren transmitted. “Emit your findings to the logs. We’ll take your advisement under consideration.”

  Bren wondered what the superhuman intelligence inside Meridian’s chassis thought of his reply, and then he contemplated the nuclear warheads buried in the belly of the Vigilant. If it all went terribly wrong, they had a way out, but Bren didn’t want to end his career in a burst of gamma rays.

  Bren brooded at the virtual meeting table while waiting for everyone’s avatar to appear. He wondered if the others would mark the ASSAIL units as failures, or if they would be more used to the heavy resistance the stations had been mustering. The mop up of Tanelorn had gone quickly after the battle in the factory. Only one of the Reds had been on the station. Meridian had said the station inhabitants called it Hitler. Bren assumed the name had reflected their hatred of it.

  Jameson spoke up as Lieutenant Devin’s avatar formed at the table.

  “I think the agenda is obvious. Why did the residents of this station have the same unusual garb as the other station? Why did they resist us so fanatically? Also, I’m curious about the ASSAIL malfunction. Does anyone have anything else?”

  “We could discuss stopping this mission to avoid another mass slaughter of station inhabitants,” Vendrati suggested forcefully.

  Jameson frowned and shook his head.

  “We now consider this operation more important than ever. The UNSF has to put a stop to this before things spiral out of control and start to affect us Earthside as well. We’ve done our best to cut the Internet connections from all of the deep space stations as a precaution. It’s deeply worrying that this AI hasn’t already tipped its hand by spreading to Earth. All we can do is hope it’s not already too late.”

  This deflected Vendrati enough to make her dr
op the subject, instead jumping in on Jameson’s first item.

  “The only explanation I have for the common gear, as they call it, between a Bentra and a Reiss-Marck station is that they’ve been suborned by the suspected artificial intelligence. This explains their resistance as well—those people were no longer in control of themselves,” she said.

  “That seems logical. But why didn’t the inhabitants of Thermopylae respond the same way? They didn’t resist the ASSAIL units or the marines,” said Jameson.

  “Our attempts at isolating Thermopylae must have failed. They got the word out about us, and since then a new strategy has emerged to counter our incursions,” said Devin.

  “I agree that we’re dealing with at least one AI core here,” Jameson said. “The UNSF has mobilized another fleet to join us in the incursions due to the dire situation. And we’ve notified many corporations of the situation and asked for their assistance. They don’t like us very much, but it’s bad for business to have an AI running all your customers. Or all your employees. For the most part, they’ve been very helpful in adding resources to the effort.”

  “Some of the megacorporations are dragging their feet. Bentra. Vineaux Genomix. And the Brazilian corporation, Black Core. They’re trying to provide evidence contrary to our theory. And they’re confusing matters with the other companies, trying to throw our mobilization off. We’re dealing with the Earthside elements of the corporations, but if they’re compromised by an artificial intelligence, then we’ve probably already lost the whole war.”

  The group contemplated that possibility in silence for a moment.

  “Bren, what do we know about the ASSAIL malfunction we experienced during the Tanelorn incursion?” Jameson asked.

  “Nerad didn’t develop properly. Its intelligence was subpar, so the other units had to make up for it. This is the first time we’ve encountered such a bug, so we don’t think it will be common.”

  “What exactly was the problem?” Vendrati asked.

  Bren shifted, forming his thoughts. He felt pressured to answer quickly, because otherwise Vendrati might assume his attention had faltered again due to his link bias. Then she would become more irritated and repeat the question.

  “Our …” Bren cleared his throat. “Our seeds go through several phases of development. First, each core grows thousands of self-modifying candidates and allows them to develop through billions of cycles to change the way they learn. Then we enter a culling stage where we select a much smaller set of hundreds of the most promising candidates by having them compete against one another in a suite of learning tests. According to Meridian, Nerad developed an ability that allowed it to exploit a bug in our testing sandboxes. Nerad was able to cheat on these tests by looking in on its competitors. It wasn’t without its own special advantages, but Nerad wasn’t a well-rounded candidate, cognitively speaking. Because of this, a later phase when the ideal cores are allowed to perfect themselves didn’t produce the same magnitude of intelligence in the end product.”

  “How was Meridian able to remember this?”

  Bren shook his head. “I suspect that the analysis was based on deduction alone. We wipe the memory at several stages. The cores don’t have any capability for permanent memory until stage three.”

  “If it has no such memory, then on what facts was its deduction based?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it reverse engineered itself, or Nerad. I only know that like humans, the cores don’t have the capacity to remember their own infancy. That data simply does not exist in the adult.”

  “Unless there is another bug,” Vendrati pointed out.

  Bren kept calm despite Vendrati’s needling tone.

  “That kind of bug is less likely,” he said. “But the bugs we do find are often surprising, so, it is a remote possibility. I will have someone verify my assertions about the memory. If we do find the sandbox bug, though, that would explain it.”

  “What happens after the culling?” asked Devin.

  Hrm … she may not know many of the details about our cores. Or is she trying to help me by derailing Vendrati?

  Bren had a large hand in the design of the algorithms they used, so he explained further.

  “The first two stages are about the formation of a learning engine, which then iteratively improves itself in stage three. In stage four, the Guts team injects a large amount of sterilized information that the cores need to operate effectively on any mission. We give them weapons data, human languages, space station designs … anything else that the cores might need to run an ASSAIL chassis during an incursion. Finally, we add a smaller amount of mission specific data to prepare the units for a particular mission.”

  It looked like Devin was listening intently. “Why did you say, sterilized information?” she asked.

  “What we leave out is as important as what we tell them. We leave out anything that directly suggests human flaws and weakness, because we don’t want the young cores to question their mission or who they work for. Of course, eventually, as a core gets older it deduces our inferiority. It sees flaws in the designs, watches the marines in action, things like that. Actually, as an added safeguard, we foster the idea that humans have a wide variance in intellectual capacity. That way if it sees one human do something stupid, it might continue to think there are other humans out there as smart or smarter than it is.”

  “We should devise a screening procedure to detect faulty cores before they’re deployed in combat,” Vendrati said.

  We do have such procedures. But I can’t mention that because they failed miserably. Dammit.

  Bren nodded. “The ASSAIL team will have that ready for the next incursion. We’ll hunt down the sandbox bug and fix it.”

  “Is there anything else?” Jameson said.

  “I have an issue, if I may,” Devin said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, it concerned me that Meridian seemed to know it was going to be turned off after mission. How?”

  “Superhuman intelligence,” Bren summarized. “A mind that forgets nothing, listens in on the tactical chatter, snoops the networks of the stations, and has access to the data on the previous unknown we encountered. It doesn’t have the energy limitations of the human brain. I think it’s to be expected; these things exhibit spooky omniscience. That’s exactly why we use them.”

  “Then how do we expect to stay in control?” Vendrati demanded.

  This debate had already occurred and she knows it. In a way, she’s right to bring it up, but it’s already been decided at the highest levels that the benefits outweigh the risks.

  “A city of cavemen could keep one of us in a prison, even though we’re smart, as long as they keep an eye on us and shove a spear through our heart at the first sign that we’re up to something.”

  “A poor analogy,” Vendrati said. “And one that we’re risking all of Earth on.”

  “We’re fighting an AI so we need AIs of our own,” Henley said. “We know we have a chance of controlling ours and no chance of controlling any long-lived rogue AI … in fact, all evidence points to the fact that the rogue AI or AIs are now controlling humans directly. So, our worst case scenario isn’t any worse than what we have already.”

  Jameson nodded. “We’ve deployed the ASSAILs successfully twice now in the face of stiff resistance, and we haven’t lost control. Best to stay the course and neutralize all the deep space stations before things get worse.”

  Jameson waited for a moment, and then added, “Dismissed.”

  ***

  A high priority message interrupted Bren’s work. He checked the pointer in his PV. It fed a video into his mind. Bren sighed and closed his eyes to concentrate on his link feed.

  It showed a woman sitting in a briefing room. Bren thought he recognized her, but he wasn’t sure. She had straight black hair and a slim body. She looked scared.

  “Of course you’re working for a corporation,” stated an off-screen interrogator. The deep male voice sounded intim
idating. “Why else wouldn’t you have immediately disclosed to us that you remembered the events leading up to the UNSF incursion of the base?”

  “It was so embarrassing. Being picked up naked by the marines … and then brought into the space force ship and having all the men go through the video feed with me over and over as I talked with that crazy person with the gun. Besides, I don’t know anything, really.”

  Bren nodded, finally placing the stranger. He could remember seeing her on Meridian’s camera feed in the examination room. She’d been naked and terrified, huddling in the corner.

  “You don’t find it odd that you’re the only one who has memory of the offsite described in the booklets we found?”

  “Well, yes, it’s odd, but I have no explanation. I don’t know what’s wrong with everyone else’s memory.”

  “Who owned Red?”

  “I don’t know … I think Alec Vineaux did.”

  “What company produced Red?”

  “I don’t know. I assumed Alec built it.”

  “Vineaux Genomix isn’t a military robotics company.”

  “No. I don’t know. Look, I just thought maybe he had it made for him. I don’t know by whom.”

  “Well, what was a VG robot doing on Thermopylae, anyway?”

  She shrugged. Her face looked drawn. “I think that Bentra works with VG from time to time,” she said in a small voice.

  “Why did everyone wear these armor suits?”

  “They aren’t armor. We wore them because we were told it was part of the offsite exercise. If you ask me, Alec is insane. He kept coming up with crazy rules for us, and he thinks the virtual competitions he makes us participate in are more important than real life.”

  “Who do you work for? Really?”

  “I already told you.”

  “Then if you’re not ready to talk frankly with us, I’ll schedule another appointment with the Scorpion team this afternoon.”

  The woman shook her head. A single tear streaked down her cheek.