Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle Read online

  “Talk to me about A.I reproduction,” Burgton said.

  Liz grimaced. “Reproduction, right.” She sighed and leaned back in her chair, interlaced her fingers over her still flat stomach, and prepared to lecture. “Artificial intelligence, according to the literature, cannot be reproduced by man... I have to say that I still believe what has been done can be done again, but every variable would have to be examined and that would take centuries even with the cooperation of multiple A.Is. So, for our purposes let’s say the literature is correct.

  “Before the Hacker Rebellion destroyed ninety-nine percent of them, A.Is had control of their own reproduction. We just facilitated it by supplying the new minds with the matrix and other things needed for them to survive. I’ve read about requests for a new A.I being denied. A planet’s government would make the request of a particular A.I and offer it certain things, but for one reason or another, the A.I refused them. It caused all sorts of controversy at the time. You know the sorts of things. Master and slave debates, with questions about which of us was the master.” Liz grimaced. “Human rights applied to artificial minds has never sat well with me, but I can see that something was needed to protect them. Whatever, A.I reproduction was entirely out of our hands. The A.I networks decided if, when, and how. Not us.”

  Burgton nodded. “Now explain the mechanics of it.”

  “But you know all this. We talked about it before starting Oracle.”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  Liz frowned. “One or more artificial minds would... donate or spawn a copy of itself to the new matrix and kick-start the new mind. At first, they were like exact copies, but separation soon caused them to diverge and develop their own personalities. Experimentation with multiple donors created some surprising results, and became the norm quickly thereafter. The A.Is preferred that method. They were uncomfortable with clones of themselves on the same net with them even when the clones slowly diverged and developed their own personalities. I guess it would be weird; like living with your brother in the same house with only one bedroom. Anyway, Humans were relegated to supplying the tech and completely shut out of the actual reproduction process.”

  Burgton nodded. “If I could get you in direct contact with an A.I—”

  “You can’t!” Liz said sounding more and more frustrated.

  “I said if I could,” Burgton said. “If I could find a way to do it, would you be able to clone it?”

  Liz shook her head. “If you could get me in with the new matrix and all its hardware, which you can’t because the core is as big as this room, and that’s only part of what’s needed, I would have to persuade the mind to transfer a copy of itself into the new matrix. If it agreed to do that, which it won’t because the ban on new A.Is can only be rescinded by the Council, then and only then would you have your cloned A.I.” She sighed glumly. “Face it George, we have no chance. The only A.Is left are in bunkers on Earth, Alizon, and Steiner. Those bunkers are so deep that not even a Merkiaari kinetic strike would harm them.”

  Burgton sat in silence for a full minute going over scenarios in his head. They were familiar and ultimately useless. The reason Oracle had been conceived at all, was the futility of trying to reach one of the old A.Is, or of trying to persuade the Council to lift the ban on new ones.

  Frustration boiled in him, but he kept it off his face and out of his voice. He stood and rounded his desk. “Well, thank you for coming to explain in person. I’ll think of something.”

  Liz gaped up at him then stood. “Think of something... right.” She headed to the door. “I’ll pull my people out and close down the site.”

  “Just seal it up. Don’t strip the equipment yet. I might have another use for it.”

  Liz just shook her head. “Why not?” she muttered. “No point wasting man hours to recover scrap anyway. What’s another three trillion credits in the grand scheme?”

  Burgton closed the door, not watching the dispirited woman leave. Three trillion didn’t mean a thing to him. He had always found ways to get what the regiment needed before now. It was what the money was for that mattered. He needed Oracle. Needed it badly.

  He went back to his desk and leaned upon it, glaring at the neatly piled compads containing 2nd battalion’s unit evaluations. He snarled and in a sudden fit of rage swepped them off the desk, his arm a black blur. The office door opened at his back, and Robshaw looked in. Probably heard the crash.

  “Get out!” Burgton snarled.

  The door clicked shut.

  * * *

  9 ~ Centrum

  Oracle facility, The Mountain, Snakeholme

  Burgton guided the shuttle into the hangar bay in the mountain and landed. The facility had never had another name. Snakeholme had mountains aplenty, but whenever anyone spoke of The Mountain, it was the underground base built below this one that they meant. It was a vast complex riddled with defensive installations and the tunnels needed to supply so many missile silos from the magazines, but it was the facility built deep below that was the main attraction. The regiment’s archive was here, and had been the first installation built, but it had been extended and upgraded constantly since then. Burgton had come to visit the latest addition.

  He rarely came here in person. His neural interface allowed him to access the archive anywhere on the planet, and the command centre was manned by civilians these days. InSec also used it to monitor the feed from Uriel, and the system’s space traffic, but most of the facilities were on power down and would not be activated for anything short of a Merki incursion into the system. Should that unhappy occasion occur, the mountain would become a fortress, ready to perform its primary task of protecting the planet.

  The Mountain, unlike the Shan keeps, was never designed to be a shelter for the civilian population. It was large enough for that purpose with room to spare of course, and at need Petruso City’s population could evacuate to it, but that wasn’t what he had built it for. It was his fortress, his arsenal and armoury. It contained enough weapons and supplies to allow the regiment to fight for years if necessary. It even had a duplicate of the tech centre, its equipment still sealed and never used so that unit repairs and even construction of new vipers could be undertaken in extreme circumstances. Where Merki were concerned, he couldn’t be prepared or paranoid enough. Other cities on Snakeholme had bomb shelters and emergency procedures but nothing on this scale.

  Having seen what the Shan had achieved by evacuating their population to the keeps in the face of a massive Merki incursion, Burgton had come away with plans to build keeps for his own people. Snakeholme’s population was much smaller than even that of Child of Harmony, and smaller installations would work very well, but his cities were far flung. He would have to construct his version of Shan keeps in strategic locations to service multiple cities.

  He frowned as he taxied the shuttle to the parking area, and started powering down its engines. It made sense to build his keeps that way, but it meant evacuation times would be extended. He shook his head. The keeps were a future project. He had far too much on his plate already. He couldn’t allow himself to be distracted by projects that would take years in the planning.

  The hangar was empty of life. He had chosen this one over the main bay because it was directly above Oracle, and he didn’t want to deal with people. Liz’s engineers had been using it to come and go, and the evidence of unfinished work was piled here and there. No vehicles though. Liz had indeed shut the site down and pulled her people out. The materials left behind couldn’t be important or useful enough to warrant the time needed to ship them back to stores.

  Burgton exited the shuttle but didn’t button it up. There was no one here to bother it, and he was in a hurry. He wanted to see Oracle himself in person. It didn’t make a lot of sense really. He had detailed schematics of Oracle—hell, of the entire Mountain—in his database, but he wanted to stand in Oracle’s centrum and try to think of a solution. Nothing else had worked and the weeks were going by incredibly f
ast.

  He crossed the bay moving through one pool of light to another. Only about ten percent of the lights were on; standard for a powered down facility. He could send a command using his neural interface to switch everything on, but there was no need. He could have used light amplification and found the elevators with much less light than he had here. There was a host of them not far ahead. Two were operational. He chose the one on the right.

  Oracle was 3km below the surface. The mountain itself wasn’t a particularly high example at 3.86km above sea level, but the combination of the two should be more than adequate to defend Oracle. It was the deepest installation so far built, and was located not far from the archive for convenience. Oracle was a huge facility not because it had redundancies and triple backups, though that made a difference of course, but because it had its very own geothermal power plant separated from everything else under the mountain. Geothermal power was as close to infallible as it was possible to be. An A.I needed infallible, its mind literally depended upon it.

  Burgton rode the elevator down to the centrum. The only levels below it were the power and cryo plants. He had no interest in those; they were no different to others on Snakeholme. He watched the lights flash by on the sides of the car. They were there to give the unenhanced a sense of movement. The elevators were very smooth and took a long time to reach their destinations. He didn’t need the lights; his altimeter was spiralling down, the figures in red indicating a negative number. He felt the elevator slowing as he approached 3km below sea level, and then halt. The doors slid aside and he stepped into Oracle’s centrum.

  At its most basic, the centrum of an A.I was a spherical room on a grand scale with a metal column dead centre and full height. The column contained the matrix that the mind was supposed to inhabit, but without the power plant, cryo plant, and a million and one other things, the matrix was just so much dead weight. The centrum reminded him of being inside a huge hollow ball bearing with a transparent floor bisecting it. Every surface, including the matrix housing, gleamed like liquid metal reflecting the dimmed lights and him. That was caused by the nanites that colonised every micron of the surface. In essence, the centrum of an A.I was a huge imaging chamber, and was where one would meet the avatar of the mind housed here if one wanted to do that.

  Face to face interaction between Humans and A.Is seemed an archaic method of communication, and it was, but every A.I ever spawned had insisted upon having the ability. They would also communicate via the net, and did so among themselves all the time at computer speeds, but a centrum was a necessity not a luxury if he wanted an A.I’s cooperation. It could be very easy to forget that the mind had free will, and an unhappy A.I would make for a very unhappy General.

  The centrum was analogous to a house, an office, and pretty much an entire world to the mind living within it, and Liz hadn’t stinted on the construction. Her jibe comparing Oracle to trillions of credits worth of scrap was well aimed. All this was literally so much scrap without a mind to inhabit and use it.

  Burgton walked across the immaculate floor toward the matrix column, his steps echoing in the vast chamber. If he remembered the specs correctly, the centrum Liz had designed and built was the biggest constructed to date. There was no theoretical limit to such things, but in real terms what possible need could there be for anything bigger than this one? It was the size of a stadium.

  Burgton stopped before the matrix housing and laid a hand upon its mirror bright surface. The 50m in diameter column reached through the floor vertically connecting the interior walls of the centrum like some great axle. It was cold to the touch, surprising considering the thickness of its walls and the layers of insulation built into it. It was essential to the matrix that the column’s interior be kept at absolute zero. That was the cryo plant’s job, and its environmental controls had triple redundancies. Its backups had backups.

  Burgton frowned as a thought flickered on the edge of his awareness. He stilled, letting it come to him. Something... about the centrum? No, not that. The matrix then? No... It was still there but was frustratingly vague. He dropped his hand, and slowly circled the column.

  His Alliance simulations were running in the archive’s computers not far from here. He had no urge to visit. The situation had not improved there. At the rate his simulations were degrading, it wouldn’t be long before he was reduced to informed guesses to base his plans upon. The solution had been Oracle, but now? He just didn’t know. He could perhaps improve the situation by running multiple simulations that were less complex in scope, with the results used as data to feed the next simulation and so on. Accuracy should increase, probably not approaching his best but better than now. The problem with that approach was efficiency. It would take much longer. The Alliance was forever expanding and had over two hundred member worlds important enough for him to watch. There were many others of lesser concern, but even they would come under his scrutiny in time. It meant more and more variables entering equations he relied upon to keep the Alliance safe. Slow, inefficient, and inaccurate guesses just would not cut it. He had to find a solution. Had to!

  With the Shan soon to be fully recognised by the Council, not just as an allied power but also as a full Alliance member, he didn’t have unlimited time to get his house in order. That was part of his reasoning for inviting the Shan to Snakeholme. He needed closer ties to them. He did, not the Alliance, him personally as representative of the regiment. He had plans for the Shan to help him make the Alliance stronger and less risk averse.

  Backups!

  He paused and closed his eyes to shut out distractions, but of course it didn’t work. New and different data added itself to his display detailing internal business, efficiency ratings and diagnostic data mostly. He opened his eyes and stared at his reflection on the column instead, and the data changed to detailing his external surroundings again. He sighed in annoyance, but he was used to such things. It didn’t distract him too much anymore.

  Yes, backups. That was what had nagged him on the edge of awareness. Oracle had backups for everything, and backups for the backups. The mind to be housed here was too precious to risk any failures. It couldn’t be Liz’s design alone. Surely all the A.Is had insisted upon fail-safe architecture. That meant there were copies of their minds somewhere didn’t it? Where would they be?

  He needed Liz.

  As quick as thought, literally, he contacted her office hoping she was at her desk. Liz was very hands on and often visited sites on Snakeholme where she had projects running. His luck was in though, and her assistant put him straight through to her.

  “Morning, George. You have something for me?” Liz said.

  “Oracle,” Burgton replied. “I’m at the site. Where are the backups located?”

  “Which ones? The ancillary and support systems all have backups on site. We basically built three of everything side by side right beneath the centrum. Easier to maintain, and let’s face it, George, 3km down is overkill. Nothing is ever penetrating that far down, especially with a mountain on top.”

  “True, but I was thinking about the matrix itself. A failure within the column would be fatal to the mind.”

  “Not necessarily. Actually there has never been a matrix failure.”

  Burgton cursed under his breath. Did that mean there were no copies? “Never?”

  “Not a one,” Liz said cheerfully. “There’s always a first time of course, but a single matrix backup would have increased our overall cost by twenty six percent. I couldn’t justify it for something that has never failed in all of history. What we did do, was provide a place for the A.I to store a snapshot of its mind. Just an addition we made to the archive. Easy.”

  “Listen Liz; is the matrix backup something you introduced? What I mean is, do all of the A.Is have copies of themselves squirreled away somewhere?”

  Liz was quiet for a moment in thought. “They don’t have copies of their minds; get that idea out of your head. What they do have is a place to store an image t
aken of the matrix at a certain time. The matrix is too complicated and too large to run conventional backup procedures.”

  “So not a true copy, but as good as?”

  “Let me put it this way. An image used for a backup is a moment in time. The A.I would record that moment, and later if necessary, it could overwrite itself with that image. It would lose everything that had happened after the image had been recorded. For the A.I, it would be like going to sleep and waking back in time not even knowing anything had happened.”

  So, so, so... Was he clutching at straws? He snorted, of course he was. “Do we know where the images are stored?”

  “For existing A.Is you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Burgton sighed. “Just no?”

  “That’s about the size of it, but I can give you a good guess.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Somewhere very secure, somewhere that lag will not be an issue. In other words, it would be stored somewhere as safe as the A.I itself or safer, and close to it. There are good reasons we built Oracle where we did, George. The archive is there.”

  Burgton nodded to himself. The archive was used for more than the regiment’s memory storage these days. It had been upgraded and augmented over the years and was Snakeholme’s central depository of information. The Alliance database was stored there and updated every time a ship returned or a drone came in. It had a role as Snakeholme’s main Infonet server, and had a million and one other uses requiring data storage. Every planet needed at least one—the core worlds had dozens—and they always would. Faster than light communications had never become a reality. Burgton wasn’t one to discount Human ingenuity, but he strongly doubted the problem would ever be solved. Until it was, local archives had to be updated periodically by drone for all kinds of reasons, especially trade. Without FTL communications, governments and investors used archaic means—gilts and bearer bonds—to move currency from system to system.