Ramez Naam - Crux

This city was alive. It was a living thing. The streets were its arteries. The cars and trucks and scooters and pedestrians its blood.

Ling closed her eyes and she could feel the nerve-signals of the living city, the vast pulsing web of data that interwove everything around her. She could lose herself in the web that linked people and cars and buildings. She could feel the far-off power stations and the local substations, the water pumps and sewage lines, the spy eyes and traffic routing systems and all the rest.

The city soothed her. She could sink into that hubbub of data, and for a while her own fears and longing and sadness would fade, and she would stop thinking and just feel the sizzling, crackling thoughts of the city around her instead.

It helped her. It helped her not think about Mother.

But today was different. Because today was the day she’d set Mother free. Today was the day she’d touch her mommy’s mind again. Her father was going to visit the Quantum Cluster today. Going to visit her mother.

And part of Ling would be there with him.

Chen Pang lifted his eyes from his slate as the car pulled up to the chrome and glass building. He slid the device away into his briefcase as his driver Bai opened the armored door of the vehicle. Chen stepped out under the umbrella the clone held aloft for him. The Confucian Fist closed the car door and walked him towards the building. The mirrored glass walls reflected the two of them back to Chen’s eyes. He: a late forties man in suit and overcoat, hair graying at the temples, his face stern – his body a bit thicker in the midsection than in his youth. His bodyguard: young, fit, tall for a Chinese man, in black chauffeur’s garb, face expressionless, umbrella held aloft to shield Chen from the driving rain, the man’s eyes scanning left and right for any threat.

The glass doors parted for him and he paused.

“Wait with the car. I’ll be an hour, perhaps two.” Then he strode on as his driver bowed to his retreating back.

Chen passed through the metal detectors and T-rays, waved his ID, and placed his eye before the retinal scanner. The elevator door opened, and he stepped in. Five floors down, below the main building, he stepped out, and into the Secure Computing Center.

The armed guard nodded at him. Chen ignored the man, and made his way across the facility to the entrance to the PICC – the Physically Isolated Computing Center.

Ling closed her eyes and followed her father’s slate and phone as they made their way down into the earth, deep below the official buildings of Jiao Tong. The devices accessed the local network inside the Secure Computing Center and formed a tunnel back to her. She reached her mind through that tunnel now, gently stroked the flow of data inside the facility, parsing, absorbing, searching. Her mother was here, trapped, cut off from the outside world, cut off from Ling. She would find her.

Chen crossed the facility. Men and women stopped work and bowed their heads respectfully as he passed. He was Chen Pang, after all, the architect of China’s explosive surge in quantum computing. He was a figure of awe to them. If only they knew.

Li-hua saw him coming. His assistant rose to her feet – a homely woman, too short, too pudgy. She bowed her head to him. “Honored Professor,” she said, “the tests you requested…”

Chen waved her away, kept walking. Yes, yes, she’d done the tests. But he needed to see them again.

He kept walking, past all the bowing underlings. The resentment rose in him again. The envy. That his greatest accomplishment was to serve as the secret scribe for his wife. That she was the true discoverer of so much.

Still, it had its rewards.

“Ling, your break time is over. Time for your next lesson.”

Ling clenched her small fists.

“Ling.” Her tutor’s voice rose slightly.

Ling forced herself to smile, forced herself to turn back to the human, the way her mother had taught her, forced herself to say the insipid words.

“May I please have a few minutes more, teacher? I like to watch the rain.”

“Well.” The tutor sounded surprised. “Since you asked so politely, you may.”

Chen surrendered his electronics at the next checkpoint. Then the security man slowly and thoroughly wanded him, looking not for weapons, but for any device that could possibly carry data in or out of the PICC.

The guard finally declared him clean, and Chen stepped forward and into the cavernous elevator. The doors closed behind him, and the elevator started its descent through one thousand meters of bedrock and towards the mad software entity that was all that remained of his dead wife.

Ling sifted through exabytes of data. Cryptographic libraries. High resolution satellite imagery. Whole brain scans. Genome sequences. None of it was her mother.

She looked for maps, physical maps, network maps. She found them. The network topology told her little. Nothing obviously fit the description of the quantum cluster her mother existed in. The physical blueprints of the building were no more helpful. Multiple data centers existed here, but their functions weren’t clear.

Ling kept searching. She would find her mother here.

The room-sized elevator took Chen down through the rock beneath Shanghai. A lit sign declared that the current PICC status was

ISOLATION IN EFFECT

All this was a precaution. Computer scientists, philosophers, futurists, writers of speculative fiction – they’d all written about the dangers of runaway superintelligence. If humanity ever created a being of radically increased mental capabilities, it placed itself at grave risk. That new being could be benevolent, of course. That would be the hope. Or it could be malicious, or simply indifferent to humans. It could seek to change the world in ways that it saw as improvements, but which were incompatible with the interests of its creators.

A superintelligent being might also be able to improve on itself, reaching into its own structure and finding ways to optimize them, to make itself smarter than its creators could have, with no obvious end in sight.

And for that reason, Su-Yong’s ability to edit herself was limited to superficial layers only.

Chen himself doubted the risk of runaway self-improvement. Intelligence showed diminishing returns. Just as a single human could not design a human-level intelligence from scratch, no superhuman creature could possibly design a creature of its own intelligence or greater. Oh, it might be able to make improvements on the methods used by its creators, and get some boost, but without collaborators, without access to new hardware, the improvements would level off.

And so he’d stretched the rules, hidden a few upgrades of his wife’s design in with more prosaic maintenance, made the case for upgraded quantum cores. All for sensible reasons, of course. All so she could produce more work of value to the Science Ministry and the State and humanity. All for the greater good.

Regardless, in this world, this world where everything was linked, where data ruled all, where cryptographic codes had replaced physical locks on the world’s wealth, on its infrastructure, on its weapons… In this world a being able to process information more rapidly than humans was the ultimate threat.

It was for such reasons that the Copenhagen Accords prohibited any attempt to create a non-human self-aware being. And for the same reasons, Chen’s own government, in sponsoring the creation of exactly such a dangerous and illegal being, had taken extreme precautions that it could be physically isolated, cut off from the outside world, and destroyed remotely if necessary.

The elevator clanged to a halt. Here, at the bottom, where no wireless transmission reached, three physical data lines connected to the outside world. One linked the Quantum Cluster to the net. That cable was physically disconnected now, its ends separated by a gap of ten meters.