Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

– It does seem the safest course of action, said Blue. All we have to do is keep quiet about the final destination of the Martian construction. That’s what we’ve been doing so far anyway. If Jay had suggested we do anything counter to our normal course of action, then we would have had to discuss things further. As it is, we’ll just carry on as we were.

Constantine nodded and took a bite of the croissant. It tasted delicious.

“Okay. I agree. What are we doing this morning?”

– Nothing. The second meeting isn’t scheduled until late this afternoon, remember? said Red.-It seems pretty obvious that whoever has caught us already knows an awful lot of things that were supposed to be top secret. You just had to look around the people in that meeting yesterday to deduce what they already know. They knew that the plan involves the hyperdrive-

– Warp drive, interrupted Blue.

– The warp drive, continued Red testily, — plus it has something to do with the AIs. Most importantly, they have figured out that Mars is involved. The big question is: what don’t they know? There must be something, otherwise they wouldn’t have us in here.

– Agreed, said Blue.-Our problem will be going along with them sufficiently so as to not raise their suspicions, while simultaneously not giving anything away.

– We have got one advantage, of course, said Red.-Grey. They probably don’t know about him, or what he is capable of.

– Pretty much the same as us, then, said Blue.

The quorum never met in the same place twice. The level of paranoia among the group could never be high enough, not when you considered what they were conceivably fighting. Constantine appreciated the irony of their second meeting place. They were in the balcony of a concert hall, looking down to the stage where the black-and-white-clad musicians of an orchestra were tuning up. Glancing around the room, he could not recall ever seeing such sensitive recording equipment before. There were devices here that could record the noise made by the Brownian motion of dust in the moisture of his eyes. The whole room was strung with directional microphones that could build up a sound picture of the local environment that was almost perfect in its reproduction. It was the ideal place to hold a meeting where secrecy was paramount.

Marion Lee had been waiting for the signal to show that the microphones were switched on. As the signal was given, she relaxed and began the meeting.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Let us begin.”

She coughed, then continued in a quiet voice. “People have long suspected a hidden intelligence guiding our development, an AI immeasurably more powerful than the others. Some people believed it first emerged in the early twenty-first century.”

Gillian Karajan nodded in agreement.

“References in the entertainments from the period would confirm that. However, you cannot take that in any way as proof of the Watcher’s existence. If you examine the historical context, you’ll see that these rumors would be inevitable. Look at the people living at the time. Only the younger generations would have lived out their life under constant surveillance, whether by cameras or phone tracking or even computer modeling. Remember, at that time, there were many who had reached adulthood before even the Internet came into existence. Increased levels of surveillance would have been very obvious to that society.”

The five of them were spread over two rows of seats, making conversation difficult. They leaned toward Gillian to better hear what was being said. Below them, a flutist practiced the same passage over and over again.

Gillian continued speaking confidently. She seemed to have quickly come to terms with her enforced exile from the Oort cloud. Maybe she understood the need for it. Or maybe there was some more sinister reason. Maybe it was just bad programming.

“…the tension generated by the interactions between the older and younger members of that society are unknown today. Nobody alive today has grown up with a true understanding of the word ‘privacy.’ Back then, they still had some concept, one fed and fanned by elderly relatives. Is it any wonder that people then began to see conspiracies where none existed? Is it any wonder the myth of the Watcher arose?”

Jay grinned. “So, you don’t believe in the stories then, Gillian?”

Gillian looked annoyed. “Listen, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think that I’m correct in saying that I know more about AIs and their history than anyone else here. If I were to believe or disbelieve the stories, it would be based on something more than a general paranoia that they are out to get us.”

There was an embarrassed silence until Masaharu spoke up gently to defuse the situation.

“I agree with Gillian, however from the opposite direction. Human beings have always sought to abdicate responsibility for their own actions. They have handed responsibility for their deeds to their sensei, to their leaders, or to a higher power. I see this yearning for a mysterious all-powerful AI that controls humanity’s actions and seeks to lead them on the path to enlightenment as nothing more than a manifestation of that same desire.”

Gillian nodded in approval

“However,” continued Masaharu, causing Gillian to glance suspiciously in his direction, “however, this is just my opinion. We cannot base our actions on the opinions of one person. We must act and plan as if the Watcher is real. This we have already agreed upon.”

“Good,” said Marion. “I’m sorry, Gillian, but we are treading over old ground here. It has already been established that, for the purposes of this project, we must assume that the Watcher is real. Just as we’ve had to assume that the Watcher did not exist until at least 2030.”

Constantine felt a little flicker of surprise that they knew this fact. He began to wonder at the need for himself to be imprisoned within this simulation at all. Surely if they knew this they could deduce the rest?

He looked around the room and wondered again if what he had been told was true. Was he really inside a computer? It all looked so real. He watched a woman un-peeling an old-fashioned chocolate bar, carelessly dropping the strips of foil on the floor before her. She was idly watching the activity below her as she placed piece after sticky piece in her mouth. Again, Constantine wondered at the programming that must have gone into the scene before him. The attention to detail was evident all around him. If he glanced up at the ceiling, he could see the looping patterns formed by the shielded wires as they led to the directional microphones. Someone had twisted blue duct tape around the one directly above him to aid in its identification. Who would have thought a simulation could go to that level of detail? Or was it a simulation? Grey should know, but Grey wasn’t speaking.

The only safe plan was to follow the course he had agreed upon with Red and Blue earlier: play along, but try to reveal nothing.

Jay was holding forth. This Jay seemed so much more confident than her equivalent on the floating balcony last night. That slightly lost look was missing here. Was it something the simulation couldn’t reproduce?

“We’ve got the expert here now, haven’t we? Why don’t we ask Gillian? Is 2030 a safe date to consider as a minimum point for the existence of the Watcher? Does anything in your work in the Oort cloud lead you to believe this to be incorrect?”

“It depends what level of AI we are talking about,” Gillian replied. “In the context of the discussion at hand, it seems reasonable. There are minimum levels of resources in terms of processing power and memory and so on required to establish an AI as we know it today. Those weren’t really available until 2030.”