Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

“What about the Martian VNM?” Jay asked.

“Far too low. That system was first postulated in the 1980s. Okay, they couldn’t build it back then, but they could work out the parameters. The idea of dropping a hundred tons of materiel on Mars and allowing factories to build themselves was just too tempting. The actual design for the system wasn’t fully mapped until 2025. We have complete understanding of how it worked; there is no space in there for a modern AI to form.”

“Okay,” Jay said. “Then I’ll ask the one question that nobody here has ever answered to anyone’s satisfaction. If the Watcher does exist, where does it come from?”

Jay sat in the row in front of Constantine. She leaned back, tilting her head over the back of her seat so that she was looking at him upside down. Her black hair spilled down, revealing how painfully thin her face was. There was a wicked glint of fun in her eyes that had been softened in the Jay that had visited him last night. Constantine felt a sudden twisting in his stomach. Blue must have felt something, too. His voice suddenly filled Constantine’s head.

– Watch it! This could be it! This is what they are trying to find out!

– But we don’t know the answer, said Red, puzzled.

Constantine didn’t know what to say. To his relief and surprise, Gillian answered first.

“No one knows,” she said. “There are lots of theories. My favorite is that the AI was the result of an evolutionary process: lots of tiny AI applets constantly coming into existence and dying, but just enough of them surviving and linking up via the Internet to form a rudimentary neural net. Or maybe it was the result of computer evolution. There were a few projects trying to simulate that process at the start of the twenty-first century. It wouldn’t be impossible that one of them evolved intelligence.”

Jay interrupted. “I’ve seen estimates from those times, based on contemporaneous technology, that said it would take around three hundred years before artificial intelligence came about by those means.”

“Yes,” said Gillian patiently. “And other contemporary estimates predicted it would take ten years. Choose which one you want to believe in.”

“What do you think, Constantine?” asked Jay.

– Tell her that the estimates for the time taken for intelligence to evolve all depend upon your definition of intelligence, said Red quickly.

Constantine repeated Red’s words.

Jay nodded thoughtfully. Masaharu intervened with a soft, deliberate tone.

“That may be so, but it adds nothing to our discussion. However intelligence was measured back then, whether by Turing test or Lau’s conjecture, has no bearing on our discussion. This is the question we must ask ourselves again: is 2030 a safe cutoff date? Can we assume the Watcher did not exist until then?”

He paused. Constantine became uncomfortably aware that they were all looking at him.

– What should he say? asked Red.-He’s got to say something without alerting them to our understanding of the true situation!

– We may have some breathing space, said Blue.-Look at the stage.

Constantine’s gaze flickered down to where the first violinist had walked out to join the orchestra. The crowd that now filled the concert hall clapped politely. The volume of applause rose as the conductor followed her out. He nodded to the first oboe, who blew a note, and one by one the rest of the musicians joined in. Constantine always felt a little thrill at the sound of an orchestra tuning up.

There was a moment’s pause and then the sound of a trumpet. Dvorбk’s Eighth Symphony. Constantine smiled appreciatively. Dvorбk had been the son of a pork butcher. After composing this symphony, he had left his native Czechoslovakia to travel to the United States of America, where he had been appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music. During his free time, he would often walk to the railway station to watch the steam trains, or to the docks to watch the ships. What would he make of Constantine’s world, where people could travel through the solar system and cause great cities to be built from a few tiny machines? What would he make of the moon colonies, or people such as Gillian who had lived in the Oort cloud? What would he think of people sitting down to listen to his music in a concert hall where recording equipment was set up to blank out as much interior and exterior noise as possible in the quest for near perfect reproduction? A hall where the electronics formed the audio equivalent of a Faraday cage, so that a group of people could hold a secret meeting, secure in the knowledge that their conversation could not be recorded. Only the orchestra, now swelling in timbre as it developed the first theme, could be heard.

Constantine sat back. He could hear Blue humming snatches to himself as the music proceeded, occasionally pointing out items of interest.

– Now listen to this: this theme will be introduced again by the basses in the final movement.

– Never mind that, said Red. What are we going to do when this piece finishes? How long have we got, anyway?

– About thirty-six minutes, usually, replied Blue. I’d guess thirty-three if the conductor maintains this gain on the tempo all the way through.

– Yeah. Well. But what’s Constantine going to say? We’ve got problems. Is this what they’re after?

– I doubt it, said Blue.-Why go to the trouble of putting him in a simulation to ask a question they themselves have as much chance of working out as we do? How could anyone work out when the Watcher came into existence?

– Good point, said Red.

– I say that we just tell them we think 2030 is a safe cutoff date. If that’s the reason they trapped us in here, more fool them.

– Okay, said Red.-I concur. However, we are merely deferring the problem. We need to know what they are really trying to find out so we can avoid giving them the answer. If we follow our current path of divulging no information, they are bound to become suspicious.

– Fine, said Blue. How are we going to find that out? We can hardly ask them. “Erm, excuse me, Marion, what is it that we should be avoiding telling you. We don’t want to-”

– Come on, Blue. You can be funnier than that. No. We’ll have to get Constantine to ask the other Jay. The Night Jay.

Constantine had half closed his eyes, ostensibly to listen to the music, but really to pay closer attention to the conversation going on inside himself. The person in the seat behind shifted position, pressing their knees into Constantine’s chair back. Constantine straightened himself up, making himself more comfortable, and then pretended to yawn.

He covered his mouth while subvocalizing, “I’m not sure the Night Jay will have a method of contacting the outside world.”

– She’ll have to give it a try. What else can we do? answered Red.

– Fine. Back to the point at hand. What are we going to do when this concert ends? asked Blue.

– Make our excuses and leave. Constantine is going to have to pretend to be sick or something.

– Where’s Grey when we need him? Blue asked petulantly.

– Take his absence as an indication that we’re doing our job properly, answered Red.-He’d be bound to interrupt if we made a mistake.

– If he’s still there, answered Blue.-Hasn’t it struck you as odd that we still have an independent consciousness? We must be an incredible drain on the resources of the host machine.

Constantine felt a little shiver of excitement run up his back. The idea had already occurred to him, but he hadn’t mentioned it with good reason. He kept quiet for the moment and just listened to the pair of them arguing. He wondered if they would raise the corollary to that thought.