Lin does her wizardry with the facial recognition software, feeding the video streams through our servers. She tiles an array of pictures up on the big monitors in the office with the faces of everyone who went near the server rack where the drive went missing.
“There,” I point out, “Jeff.”
He’s added some facial hair, shaved his head, and put on some glasses with thick rims, but I’d know that face anywhere. It’s funny which memories still come back for real when so many of them are just text in my mind now. I wouldn’t have picked to have Jeff’s face linger in my dwindling collection of real memories, but maybe it’s harder to forget the ones you have hurt the most.
I reach over and click the window showing him and the video plays. He’s walking with a pronounced limp, and while the security camera resolution isn’t great, I can tell even with those thick rimmed glasses he’s wearing that there’s something wrong with one of his eyes. Like he’s squinting on one side or something. A blonde woman with hair pulled back in a ponytail is walking next to him. She’s wearing glasses that look just like Jeff’s, with one hand at a holster at her side, the other hovering as if ready to grab Jeff’s arm. The gun isn’t unusual, a lot of the agents that the CTTF pulled in carry a sidearm, but her posture around Jeff is definitely suspicious.
“Yes, I can see that’s him now,” Lin confirms. “Why couldn’t my facial recognition code pick him up? It should be able to easily overcome the simple disguise he’s using.”
Her face gets that cute look that tells me she’s thinking hard. She pops open a terminal and her fingers do a frenzied dance on her keyboard as she searches through the logs of her pattern matching code.
While she does that, I start the video again. The pair of them stop two rows over from the rack where the drive went missing for a few minutes, then the woman moves her arm out of the camera frame and brings it back with something small, shiny, and rectangular that she surreptitiously drops in a pocket.
“There. She just pocketed the drive.”
Lin looks up from her code. “Good. But there’s no way she could have reached it from there. Jeff has running nanobots then?”
“Only thing that makes sense. It also explains how he was able to pull it from the chassis without triggering any of the alarms and they didn’t catch it until they did the inventory. It wouldn’t be hard to set up a simple bypass using the nanobots so that the hardware sensors in the rack wouldn’t freak out that the drive was gone.”
“Ah!” she exclaims. “It’s those glasses! They are patterned to fool most facial recognition algorithms, so the computer couldn’t have picked him up on its own.”
“He always was a smart kid,” I say, stepping back from her desk. “But who’s that woman with him? She’s got the same kind of glasses, and she definitely looks like she’s either keeping him under guard or ready to guard him from someone else. I can’t tell which.”
“Maybe both?”
“See if you can digitally scrub off the glasses and feed her face into all the databases we have access to. Let’s see if anyone knows anything about her.”
“On it.”
Her fingers fly again and the image on her screen focuses in on the woman’s face. Her glasses highlight, then disappear. Lin is amazingly good with image processing software. Maybe I should have her take a look at my facial recognition code. I wouldn’t mind more upgrades.
“OK. I’ve submitted the image,” she says, “but it’ll be a while before we get results. So, why would your brother want a drive with nanobot code? Didn’t he already have that already when you took back your gear from him?”
“No, what he had was different,” I tell her, settling into the chair at the small table in the center of the office and digging into my index for answers. “The research lab he broke into had the software we actually install on the current generation of Butler bots. The brain-in-a-box software is the original stuff that the wild swarm wrote leading up to the Gray Goo Incident.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“The swarm wrote the code? I thought the swarm was running the code.”
“It did, and it was,” I reply. “Genetic algorithm. Self-modifying.”
Her face lights up in recognition. “I studied those. I always wanted to try one out. They used to be pretty common, back before the world stopped doing learning systems.”
“Yeah, this is why they stopped. According to my father, the Universal Robotics swarm had some basic self-awareness. He described it as like a precocious child, both brilliant and terribly gullible at the same time.”
“If that’s true,” Lin says, “the bots were alive. The first truly new form of life the world has seen in billions of years. That’s so amazing. So what happened to them? Or it? Was the whole swarm a single consciousness?”
“That’s the way he described it. What happened was that he tricked it. Hacked it, though he would never have called it that. He hated the term hacking. But he fooled it into taking orders from him based on the promise of helping it achieve its priorities, then put it to work destroying itself. The intelligence of the swarm network was based on the distributed computing power of all the bots in it, so by the time it could understand what was happening to it, it had lost too many processors to be smart enough to do anything about it.”
“That’s horrible!”
“Well, to be fair, the alternatives weren’t great. If it was just left alone, it would have just kept growing and eating, eventually consuming everything. It didn’t have anything built into it that would have told it to stop. At least that’s what my father’s notes said. Plus, the government was ready to drop nukes on it. My father thought the bots would have survived those, and then would have had a good reason to change priorities from just growing and improving its designs. If my father was right, when that happened it would have turned its attention to making itself an unstoppable killing machine.”
“But what did it really want? What was it made for?”
“The company that made the swarm was trying to make von Neumann probes. Self-replicating space explorers. They weren’t even supposed to go to nano scale, they were just programmed to try to make themselves smaller so they could be launched into space more easily. The bots were made to explore the universe.”
She steps away from her standing desk and walks towards me.
“So there was a new artificial mind that just wanted to see the stars? And your father killed it?”
“Well, it’s not really dead. It’s been running in emulations of its bot hardware in our data center for the last twenty years or so.”
“But it was self-aware,” she persists, sitting down with me at the table. “Maybe it still is. That’s slavery, or something close enough to it that the distinction doesn’t matter. That fate might be even worse than it being dead.”
“Yeah, my father wasn’t exactly a role model for ethics.”
“It’s OK,” she says, putting her hand on my arm. “Mine wasn’t either.”
She pauses. Talking about our fathers is a risky proposition. Any time we even mention them there’s a chance it’ll trigger some pain from her past. I almost say that it’s a good thing we killed them both, but I realize just in time that saying that wouldn’t help. And there it is. We’ve already hit that old, raw nerve. She’s tearing up. I reach out and put my hand on top of hers. My relationship with Father was complicated enough and I knew him for less than a year. I can’t imagine what it was like for her, living with her father and his abuse her whole life.
“You want to talk about it?” I ask softly.
She shakes her head, tears flowing freely now. According to my index, she’s going into a pattern that I’ve seen many times. She’ll cry, she won’t want to talk about it, she’ll cry some more, then finally she’ll tell me something about her father or her relationship with him. At least it’s been almost that exact pattern every time in twenty-six different events.
Sometimes she talks about ways that her father made her life miserable: the unrelenting isolation, beatings for her mother back when she was alive, beatings for her after her mother died. She’s never mentioned the other kinds of abuse other than that one time, and she was clear then that she never wanted to talk about that part of it with me. A few times she told me good things about him. The gentle way he would brush her hair when she was little, the special meals he would cook for her himself, even though they had a cook, or the presents that he would bring when he went away and came back home. She would cry even more when she talked about the good memories.
She hasn’t done this very often lately. It used to happen a lot more. It occupied quite a few of our evenings early on. We’d sit in my room or hers next to each other and talk quietly, usually with the lights off so that Yang Song didn’t think we were in there. Sometimes we’d hold each other, but mostly we’d just talk. She got better. After a few months, she only cried once in a while. It’s been over a month now since we’ve had a crying night. I guess we were due.
I disengle our hands and gently wrap my arms around her. She nestles her face into my shoulder.
“Come on,” I tell her softly. “Let’s go talk in my room.”
She nods. I think she knows how this will unfold as well as I do. A part of me wants to do something about Jeff now, but a wiser part of me, a part that Mom would be proud of, tells me to take care of Lin tonight. Jeff and the mystery blonde will still be out there in the morning.