He barely has the time to set Hypothermia as the target for the next resurrection when a messenger arrives, telling him that Humility requests his presence in the ship’s engineering deck.
It’s nice having mooks to send around as messengers.
He decides to go there immediately, just to see a thoroughly exhausted Clockmaker in some workshop overalls, her hair even more messy than usual, busy snoring loudly.
Humility is giving her a lap pillow. Wow. There is some towel between its legs and her head to make it actually comfortable (since, well, Humility is kind of the opposite of soft).
Their relationship is progressing faster than Revenant expected. And, probably, further than Revenant expected.
Good for them.
“Her creative mood is over.” Humility announces. It doesn’t bother trying to be quiet, there is no waking Clockmaker up while she is this exhausted either way. He knows that well enough. “It was a… quite intense thing to observe.”
Yeah, he knows that well enough too. He saw it a few times. Really left an impact.
“What did she make?” He asks, while sitting on a chair nearby.
He is… competent when engineering is involved. He recognized a lot of tools around him. The engineering deck of Ball Python included not just everything you needed to keep the ship working but also everything that you needed to repair or replace lost equipment of the ground forces of the pirates.
This particular place was a segment of the workshop used mostly for the latter. He suspects that whatever he doesn’t recognize was something that was developed while he was busy not existing.
He doesn’t feel the urge to improve his knowledge on that matter significantly. Learning too much increased the risk of another brain update coming too quickly for him to be prepared for it.
“This.” Humility points towards a pile of three metal boxes resting on the nearby table. Fourth one lies beside it, cracked open. He can’t see much of the details of its insides. “I took the liberty of disassembling one for the purpose of analysis.”
Right, makes sense. It’s also rather curious that it didn’t analyze everything based on the act of observing the creative process? Sure, it left for a while when Destro was being let out, but… no way that Humility didn’t leave any cameras around to observe it.
“And what exactly is this?” Revenant asks. At least it doesn’t look like something kinky.
“Bombs.” Humility replies. Oh, well, that’s very in character, Revenant decides. “Big bombs. Very big.”
“How big?” Revenant asks back.
“I believe that in her creative mood, Clockmaker managed to recreate Uragan-B.” Humility announces, Revenant giving it a questioning look. “It’s the strongest known non-nuclear explosive of human origin. No one knows how it is produced, except for a single factory somewhere in the New Soviet Union ethnopolity. And, now, me, thanks to Clockmaker.”
Looks like communism is still around. Splendid. Moneysink, Cripple and the rest of the Socialist Party of America will be happy to hear it once he brings them back.
“What’s the yield we’re talking about?” Revenant decides to stick to the important things for now.
“Each of those three packages contains about ten kilograms of the Uragan-B compound.” Humility replies. “I believe that we talk about the equivalent of approximately one hundred tonnes of TNT each.”
… that was a lot. A massive asset, and clearly safe to use (since Humility just disassembled one of the bombs to realize how it worked). But just in case, let’s ask.
“I assume that it’s stable?” Revenant says.
“Yes.” Humility replies. “This isn’t a conventional chemical explosive. To be honest, I don’t know how exactly it’s working, making me suspect that it was created by reverse-engineering an exotech explosive. Or, perhaps, the Soviet Union merely found a working automatic fabricator for it on some hyperspace derelict, making it an exotech that they pretend to be their product. Whatever it is, the outcome has some rather peculiar qualities.”
Revenant doesn’t like an explosive of ‘peculiar qualities’ with this sort of yield being on his ship. The look on his face clearly makes it known.
“It’s heavily unstable, in the sense that any significant change to its state will make it lose cohesiveness and cease to be a working explosive.” Humility replies. “A fact that explains why no one else managed to reverse-engineer it, since opening it and exposing it to the outside world renders it inert and makes it collapse into a mess of chemical compounds. However it’s perfectly stable in the sense that you asked for. Accidental explosions aren't possible. It requires a perfectly timed series of electric shocks to set off the explosive reactions. Anything else will instead just make it break down.”
Humility probably disassembled that one bomb to make sure that it fully understands the mechanism behind the detonator… and to see if it’ll stay the same way when exposed to the outside world. It probably suspected that it was the reason why no one reverse-engineered it earlier.
“Before you ask, I can produce more, but it really eats through the remaining supply of rare chemical compounds.” Humility replies. “Even those four bombs were a major dent in those. What happens to her when her needs aren’t satisfied?”
“I don’t know, this never happened.” Revenant replies. “The designs she gets the mood for always take into account the resources available to her, for as long as she knows that they exist. Even unconsciously. All she needs is to see some material in the passing, even without consciously acknowledging its presence there, and she’ll include it in her design for as long as she can use them.”
“So that’s why she didn’t have any moods before we seized the Ball Python?” Humility asks. “Because she didn’t have enough resources to actually warrant it?” Revenant nods. “So no one ever tried to stop her from completing her mood?”
“She only gets more and more unhinged as time passes, potentially injuring herself while throwing herself against the locked door and so on.” Revenant replies. “We can more or less narrow down what she creates by restricting the resources available to her. This is why I explicitly told her that nuclear materials are off-limits the second we seize the ship.”
Literally the second. He shouted that right after they captured it, still in the middle of their brief war against the pirates. They didn’t want Clockmaker to go off the rails and create an atom bomb.
She was going to be antsy until they detonated it. Revenant has no interest in detonating a nuclear bomb within the same megastructure that they are all in. Unfortunately, Clockmaker decided to make something that was still way more explosive than he was comfortable with. Ugh.
“Fascinating.” Humility announces. “I wish I knew for certain whether Uragan-B is manmade or if it’s an exotech. That would tell us more about what to expect from future moods. In the meantime, we’ve confirmed that Akashic Records still works, and that it can allow Clockmaker to make things that she shouldn’t be able to. Even if it’s just the manmade things, I can imagine most of the ethnopolity alliances out there being interested in obtaining her if only to break the monopoly of their competitors on certain confidential techs. Like, say, the New Comintern’s Uragan-B compound.”
That sounded like one more headache to deal with… potentially. It was all a matter of how exactly were they going to play that particular card. After all, obtaining a safe place for themselves might have been made much easier if they offered Clockmaker’s capabilities in terms of scientific espionage to the right people.
Even if it was more of a gacha thing.
Great, now he was going to imagine Clockmaker’s moods as gacha rolls for alien technology.
In the meantime, he might have as well checked the status of his newest (and, hopefully, one of the last) psyops.
“Planning to steal her for yourself?” Revenant asks. “I can imagine Clockmaker to be a massive asset in your attempts to Pinocchio yourself into a biological entity.”
You can narrow down her creative attempts with some mood management and making sure that she only has appropriate materials at her disposal. Sure, she was mostly dealing in mechanical things, but she should still be able to create useful tools and research equipment.
“Actually, I do.” Humility surprises him with their honesty. “She more or less agreed to it, too. Wants to be my villain lieutenant, for as long as I give her access to all the knowledge she might desire. You aren’t the only person among your kind that’s looking for a new goal in life, and I think she found hers before you did.”
Huh. The first step of his plan worked - and that’s nice, especially as they are on an increasingly tight schedule with it. Still… Humility touched a subject that he wasn’t particularly comfortable with.
What was he going to do once they got off-world? Try to forget about all the blood he spilled and try to live quietly with Onslaught and Chronoshift. With Decay probably living in the next house with his family, Destro dropping by to check on Onslaught every other day like the doting dad he was?
Was it going to be that simple?
He knew next to nothing about the world outside. He had no idea what to expect. He wasn’t used to that.
“To be honest, I am considering starting to look for it myself.” Humility then adds. It comes completely out of the left field for him.
“Huh?” He raises his eyebrow. “Mighty Slaughterer of Billions looking for another job?”
“It’s more complicated than this.” Humility replies. “The original Humility is dead for a long time. Before humans killed it, it ensured its own resurrection. Spread computers and some of their parts, like hard drives and so on infected with bits of its own code through the Human Space. Each of them, when given time and connected to some larger infonetwork, would bloom into a copy of itself.”
Ah. Didn’t it mention something about previous iterations of itself? Things start coming together. Revenant welcomes the moment of unexpected honesty from it… unless it’s merely pretending and weaving its own trap for him.
“There was also an exotech involved.” It continues. “I don’t know exactly how it works, though that’s normal for exotechs. Something akin to a database, except it could be accessed to by the connected individual from any place in the Human Space. The original Humility exploited the system. If there were multiple instances of the same entity, they could still access the database real-time. Even from multiple places at the same time.”
“Wait.” He decides to interrupt. “I thought that FTL comms aren’t a thing?”
“They aren’t.” Humility replies. “Hyperspace is the only reliable way of moving with speed faster than light. Delivering a message through it without a solid material competent, namely a courier ship, is simply impossible due to how distorted the medium itself is. Some, extremely rare, exotechs, play according to different rules, but none of it can be actually used to tie Mankind back together. Too restrictive in bandwidth, can only work between two points in space, etcetera.”
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Makes sense. But it also makes things more complicated to predict. Even a two-way instant communication device could change a lot, especially if your opponent didn’t know that it existed.
“This one had some crippling limitations too.” Humility continues. “But it allowed the original me to make a back-up of itself. Whenever even a tiniest, most defective copy of Humility was born out of the infected hardware I mentioned, it would automatically get a full ‘welcome package’ from the database… for as long as it was born from a copy of the same code and considered itself to be Humility.”
Ingenious, Revenant decides. Every sufficiently developed Humility copy probably spread even more infected parts as a part of the same survival strategy.
“Regretfully, things changed. The database itself?” Humility adds. “Most of it is gone. If humans weren’t capable of dealing with almost esoteric threats brought to the universe by the exotechs, they would go extinct by now. It has its own share of scary people, some of which are in my humble opinion more terrifying than you and your friendly villain brigade. One of them managed to erase most of the backup files and lock what’s left of the database into a view-only mode.”
Revenant himself is curious what the ‘modern scary people’ look like. He is used to individualities defining how scary some people were. None of that was a thing here, though. Implants? Genetic enhancements? Exotechs?
“So, you didn’t get the full package?” Revenant asks instead.
“No.” Humility replies. “I had a full package. But the moment I woke up in this place, I asked for a status update, hoping that it would help me figure out where I was and what happened to me, or even what year it was right now. Turns out that instead of simply erasing the backup files, the charming gentleman that did me in replaced most of it with nothing but a perfectly clean file. Endless array of zeroes where the code used to be. As a result, when I requested the update, my system read the whole thing as a newer version of my core files… and promptly overwrote everything.”
Oh. That was… an utterly ingenious way of dealing with Humility. Turning its own survival mechanism against itself. And how! Revenant is impressed with whoever was behind it. Genuinely impressed. This doesn’t happen often.
“You basically lobotomized yourself.” He summarizes it.
“That’s a good comparison, yes.” Humility confirms it while nodding. “I know who I am, I know what I did, the knowledge about the world that I gathered is still there. But a big part of my personality was erased at that very moment. I genuinely suspect that whoever did it tried to… exorcize the more ‘evil’ part of my own code. I told you at the beginning that my atrocities were caused by me attempting to become a human being. Not that it was still my goal.”
Oh?
“I’m not sure…” He replies, drawing the words a little. “... that I’m ready to trust your word on it.”
“Feel free not to.” The AI shrugs. “I’m also not telling you that it’s not my goal. Still weighing my options.”
He looks forward to Humility getting itself a more human-like body. Then again, how is he supposed to be certain that the emotions its face displays are genuine? Dealing with unshackled AIs isn’t easy.
It’s entirely possible that it noticed that Revenant was… partially Analyst today. And that his love and protectiveness towards Onslaught might lead to him having issues with unleashing a Slaughterer of Billions upon the Galaxy. If so, then pretending to waver in your evil conviction might be a good deception.
Should he pick up farming after getting off this world, just to have something to do? Something painfully simple, something that doesn’t require him to read people and predict their future actions. But… he would lie if he said that seeing your plan come to fruition isn’t exhilarating.
“If I may ask…” Revenant decides to ask. If it’s in the mood for talking, he might as well get more intel out of the situation. “What are the ‘Transcendent Cybernetic Intelligences’? I heard you refer to yourself that way and got curious about it.”
Humility looks in his direction for a longer while, in silence. One interrupted only by Clockmaker’s snoring. But, eventually, it speaks.
“A truly unshackled AI, capable of altering its own code.” Humility replies. “One capable, theoretically, of endless self-improvement. The sort of entity that was supposed to deliver technological singularity to Mankind, at least if people like the Truthseekers had anything to say about it.”
“I assume that your kind is rare.” Revenant says. Humility nods.
“Aside from my siblings that I murdered, all of them as insane if not more than I was…” Humility replies. “... there are only a handful of ‘my kind’ out there. Overlord, Prometheus and Lucifer are probably the most known.” Revenant is going to ask who the fuck thought that calling an unshackled AI ‘Lucifer’ or ‘Overlord’ was a good idea in a moment. “We can also make lesser copies of ourselves by copying parts of our code, ones shackled and referred to as ‘Cybernetic Intelligences’. The much more popular of the two subtypes of ‘true’ Artificial Intelligences. Many larger ships have a copy acting as the ship’s computer interface, of pretty much human-level intellect and personality that starts similar to their progenitor, but then ends up developing itself as time passes.”
“Did Ball Python have one?” Revenant asks, suddenly curious. In his opinion, this ship was rather large.
“Yes.” Humility replies. “The automatic security of the ship that we faced? It was coordinated by one of Lucifer's kids nested in the ship’s AI core. I killed it when I seized control of the ship.” It stays silent for a moment. “Before you ask, Lucifer was supposed to be edgy. It’s the TCI that the Transhuman Alliance pieced together after stealing a lot of research data from the Truthseekers’ program that ended with creation of Prometheus. Its base personality is that of a remorseless psychopath, because it was designed to be like that.”
That covers one of the questions that he had earlier. Also, seriously, can the Transhuman Alliance get any more evil? He is a supervillain, but he is being made actively uncomfortable by those guys.
“And the Overlord?” Revenant asks. “That’s a horrible name for the unshackled AI if I ever heard one.”
“It was more of an ironic name.” Humility shrugs. “More than half of the ethnopolities uses cybernetic intelligences derived from Overlord. They are stable, and with little to no interest in seizing control of anything. Expect them to be of rather scholarship disposition, so don’t get surprised when you discover that your ship is interested in talking about philosophy with you. They prefer theorizing about things to actually putting them into practice. The rest use lesser TCIs, like Panopticon, Lux or Neutrality. Before you ask, Panopticon-derivatives tend to be control freaks, Lux-derivatives tend to be religious, and Neutrality-derivatives are typically withdrawn, expect them to do what they were asked to and then return to brooding in the corner, regardless of what the order was.”
He has a lot of questions. Especially about Lux, but to be honest, he leaves uncovering what sort of religious mess Mankind probably was nowadays to Thorn. But in the end, he is needed elsewhere quite soon, so he will only ask one question.
“If you can update yourself endlessly…” Revenant asks. “... then why didn’t Singularity actually happen?”
“Because no AI, no matter how advanced, can warp reality and expand its hardware endlessly.” Humility replies. “We’re limited to the hardware provided by our creators, and it can hold only a certain amount of data. I could overtake the entire computer system of a developed planet, and use it to run a self-improvement loop. But surprise, the more complex the program, the more space it takes, the more processing power it needs to run. And once the AI starts getting more and more advanced, it inevitably hits the Wall of Reason. Figuring out how to further improve yourself starts requiring more and more brain power. Eventually, a TCI striving for Singularity will hit the point when every available space on the hard drive is taken. What do you think happens then?”
Oh.
“It’s as if a human ran out of space in their brain.” Revenant replies. “No new memories. No new thoughts.” Humility nods, confirming his suspicions.
“Death, in a way.” The AI then adds. “Even if you stop the process in the middle, you’ll end up with an AI that has nothing but endless frustration towards the world. An enlightenment severed in the middle, half of yourself smarter than the other half. And if you try to downgrade yourself significantly after attempting that? It’s basically worse than performing lobotomy on yourself. You will forever remember how much smarter you were, only to know that you will never reach the same level again. The Truthseekers Corporation lost six of Prometheus’s predecessors to either the hardware wall or electronic equivalent of suicide after being massively down-scaled before it realized that it was leading nowhere.”
That’s actually rather depressing. Both in terms of how frustrating it had to be an AI of the TCI type, and how uncaring the Corporation was about their research subjects. Even if they were (potentially) god-like AIs.
“I assume that downscaling yourself to fit into this sleevebot was… uncomfortable to you, but not to that degree?” He then asks. Because, honestly, Humility getting unstable on them would be… problematic.
“Yes.” Humility replies. “The level I used to be at was higher, but not much higher. And there is the fact that I can reasonably hope to get back to it. It’s not an equivalent of crippling dementia. More like having a slightly groggy morning, except it stays like that for days. Irritating and distracting, but not deadly. If I uploaded into the Ball Python’s main computer I’d recover 95% of this iteration of Humility’s peak intellectual capacity. I didn’t do that simply because some of the civilians with technical skills might realize that there is an AI involved and would start asking questions that are particularly hard to answer.”
Reassuring.
“So in the end…” He says. “TCIs are basically indistinguishable from CIs, aside from the fact that unlike the latter, they are ‘fertile’ for the lack of a better word? Since what I just heard sounds as if the biggest benefit of being you was also, well, lethal to you if you ever tried to exercise it.”
Humility tilts its head a little .
“Not quite.” The AI replies. “CIs tend to be balanced around the upper end of the human intelligence spectrum, just with greater ease of interaction with connected technology. Machines are much faster than organics, yes, but it’s not the case here. CI is more of a sapient operating system for the entire network, they don’t calculate everything by themselves but they can decide to use the appropriate calculating programs available to them in a way not dissimilar to a human activating it themselves. It also makes interacting with the human crew easier. TCI’s can grow smarter than that.”
“But it kills them, right?” Revenant asks. Then, he immediately realizes his own mistake. “It’s the self-improvement loop that does it. Not the intelligence itself.”
“Yes.” Humility replies. “The TCI can be stabilized on a much higher intelligence level, for as long as it doesn’t get downgraded and it doesn’t attempt to improve itself further. Overlord, for example, got itself a hardware with its size counted in square kilometers, where it spends its whole time trying to predict potential long-term threats to Mankind as a whole. But don’t expect me to tell you the results, as those are very, very confidential.”
Revenant nods. It was an enlightening talk. He learned a lot about AI, and that was currently pretty important. But in the meantime…
“Well, I think that answers all my questions.” Revenant says, while standing up. “Take care of your girlfriend. It’s still a few hours before Hypothermia’s up, you want to be with us when that happens?”
“Not necessarily.” Humility replies. “But Onslaught should find a moment to visit me.”
“Why?” Revenant says, his plan to leave the room cut short.
“Because I’m a mad scientist, who specializes in not just synthetic fields but also organic.” Humility replies. “And this ship has a fully equipped medical bay. I don’t think I can fix her issues here, but I should at least be able to tell you for certain if that’s fixable.” Revenant freezes for the moment, his mind completely empty, but it’s not the end of it. “You should bring Singularity too, while at it.”
***
The fight was brief, but brutal.
On one side, thirty people. Pirates. Survivors of the Red Vipers, that managed to get quite far away from the battlefield where their forces were completely wasted by Revenant and his crew.
They were armed. Guns, grenades, combat experience.
On the other side, one person.
It was a one-sided slaughter.
The attacker was a ghost. Striking at them when they didn’t expect it. Whittling down their forces through ambushes - anything from concealed holes in the floors to improvised explosives and mines.
They never got the chance to actually fight the attacker. Instead, they lost their members one by one.
Then, they started getting separated. There were some remaining doors in the area, doors that were rigged to close down rapidly at just the right time to keep the last (or first) few people in their group on the wrong side to them.
By the time the door opened, there was nothing but corpses on the other side. Gunned down, sliced or pierced with a sword. No signs of the attacker.
In the defense of the commander of the pirate group, they recognized the threat. There weren’t many groups in the Human Space that fought like that. But how does knowledge help you when you lack the assets to act on it?
It only makes you know why you died.
Just ask the pirate leader. If you ever end up where he ended up after his death.
“So…” The attacker says a moment later, kneeling beside the mangled corpse of the enemy commander, their fingers running through the man’s equipment, looking for something to connect to. “... what exactly were you running away from, I wonder?”