Chris Moriarty: Spin Control

The plan was simple. It was a classic exchange of prisoners. Except that in this trade there were three prisoners instead of two. And the exchange would take place not across some lonely field or border checkpoint, but in the claustrophobic shooting gallery of the house on Abulafia Street. The only thing keeping the parties honest would be the Enders, Palestinian and Israeli, that Turner finally agreed to let supervise the exchange. The Enders, of course, would be kept honest by their source code.

Which meant that anyone who could hack EMET would be halfway to controlling the battlefield.

They needed to hack a squad for, say, ten minutes. And all they had to do to hack a squad was hack the EMET squad leader that controlled the shunt-driven bodies of the squad’s Enderbots.

“But the beauty of a true Emergent,” Gavi said, “is that you don’t have to change its source code to change its behavior. Here’s what we’re up against.” He did something with his hand and a translucent flat screen took shape under his fingers. The screen glowed with a long list of cryptically named categories—terms like advance, cluster, combat, pursuit, retreat, support, enemy_flag, injured_ally, fear_index—all with numerical values attached to them.

“This is a typical set of squad-level agent behavior parameters. Notice particularly the two obey indices and the fear index. The global obey index determines how likely the agent is to obey global EMET orders. The local obey is the same thing but in regard to local orders—mainly squad-level orders in most situations. The fear index…well, I guess that’s pretty self-evident.

“Now look at the real-time run-files. I’ve superimposed run-files for the last eight squad leaders to be selected for preemptive termination—or, in less diplomatic terms, the last eight squad leaders that the IDF killed before they could self-terminate.”

“What’s that spike in the fear index?” Cohen asked, having absorbed the chart, and who knew what else, in the time it took Arkady to realize there was a chart.

“That,” Gavi said, “is truth.”

“Aah,” Cohen said. And then he didn’t say anything else for a minute while the rest of them watched him. He seemed to have more or less forgotten them; if he had been human, Arkady would have called his state distracted, but he wasn’t sure that distraction applied to an entity for whom their conversation—any conversation—was a mere drop in an ocean of simultaneously unspooling threads of data.

“Should I go on?” Gavi asked.

“Yes. Sorry. Excuse me.”

“In each of the last eight EMET agents to be selected for preemptive termination the emergence of real-time situational awareness was preceded by atypical fluctuations of the fear index and the obey indices. See?” He looked expectantly at them. “Because the agent figured out that the pushpins it was moving around on the board were live people.”

“So it got spooked,” Osnat said, “and started playing it safe even if it meant not following orders.”

“Right. And that’s where you get the odd fluctuations. Because it also deduces that the other squads are also made up of live soldiers. If it sets too high a priority on protecting its squad members, it could get more soldiers in other squads killed. Or worse, it could accidentally kill civilians.”

“Welcome to Military Ethics from hell,” Osnat said. “No wonder they go crazy.”

Cohen stared silently at the display with a look on his face that Arkady could only describe as one of existential horror. “How long would we have to wait for a squad to wake up?” he finally asked. “What says one wakes up in time for us to use it?”

“You don’t want the answer to that question,” Gavi said.

Cohen grew very still. “How often are they waking up, Gavi?”

“Often enough that we don’t have anything to worry about on that score.”

Cohen stared unblinkingly at the screen. “I think,” he finally said, “that I’ve lived too long.”

Gavi eyed Cohen cautiously, then cleared his throat and continued. “I’ve looked over the last few years of run-capture files, and I think IDF HQ is using a standard profile to spot potential sentients. In essence, it doesn’t actively monitor the run-capture files of individual squad leaders until they develop a suspicious profile. If we can catch a squad leader after the fear and obey indices have started to fluctuate but before they hit the IDF thresholds, then I think I’ve worked out a way to pull the wool over the IDF’s eyes. All we’d need to do is insert a wild card trigger that yanks the fear and obey indices out of the Emergent’s hands as soon as the fluctuations begin and lets us set them to fluctuate within bounds that won’t alert the IDF minders.”

“Okay,” Osnat said. “So that gets you your squad. But with all due respect, I’m not sure I see how it helps us. You’re still left with the same problem the hard reboot was geared to solve. And what’s the good of going into an operation backed up by Enderbots that are on the verge of going catatonic or self-terminating? Unreliable backup is worse than no backup.”

“The EMET agents go catatonic because there’s no way out,” Gavi said. “We just need to offer them one.”

At that point the conversation shifted into what sounded to Arkady’s ears like a foreign language. Gavi and Cohen began to pour over flickering data displays and bandy about words like run capture, multiparameter fitness landscape, lethality contours, and penalty functions. Osnat, while not exactly an active participant, at least had a firm enough grasp on the matter at hand to produce a volley of intelligent-sounding questions that centered around something she called Cavalho-Rodriques combat entropy.

Once again Arkady had that odd feeling of having stepped into an alternate universe in which the old story he’d always been taught of an obsolete and ossified humanity giving way to the Syndicates in a clean neo-Marxist ballet of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis had been replaced by something that rang much truer to his entomologist’s instincts: a coevolving cloud of quasi-species in which Homo sapiens had not been replaced so much as exploded out into a bewildering fractal of coevolving posthumanities.

“I still don’t see how you expect to make it work,” Osnat said finally. “You talk about providing a new platform for the rogue EMET squad, but how can you fold an emerging sentient into a nonsentient database and not crash both of them? You can bootstrap yourself into sentience on memory alone. I don’t think GOLEM’s going to do the job for you.”

Gavi didn’t appear to have heard the question. He was staring at Cohen. The AI was staring into empty space, or into whatever incomprehensible visions drifted and pulsed across his networks.

“GOLEM doesn’t have to do it,” he said at last. “I do.”

The Day of Atonement fell into Jerusalem on a blanket of snow. The cold front hit the afternoon before Yom Kippur, flowing down off the glaciers above the Jordan’s headwaters. The snow began at sunset and thickened through the night and into the early morning. It was still falling when Cohen stepped out of the King David Hotel, nodded to the solitary doorman still on duty despite storm and holiday, and began the cold walk to the Damascus Gate checkpoint.