He was hastily brushing off the chalk when one of the agents called out, “The President of the United States.”
President Rebecca Smith entered the room, trailed by her retinue. “Please be seated, gentlemen,” she said as she took a seat at the head of the table.
Mike and Leon sat down together.
“Mike Williams, Leon Tsarev, please meet Secretary of Technology Feld. Feld, please meet Williams and Tsarev, the department heads of the Institute of Applied Ethics.”
They all nodded politely at each other.
“I reviewed your proposal, Mr. Williams,” Feld said. “I see you are proposing two departments. The first is an Ethics department for creating the definitions, encoding, and incentives for guiding ethical behavior.”
“That’s correct,” Mike said.
“And an Architecture department will focus on the implementation of a peer reputation system. You want the AI to police each other. That group will be headed by Mr. Tsarev.”
Leon didn’t say anything at first, then noticed Mike looking meaningfully at him. “Yes, that’s right,” Leon said, trying to keep his voice steady.
Feld peered over his glasses at Leon.
“Mr. Tsarev, you are how old?”
“Nineteen, sir,” Leon answered.
“Hmmm… Are you capable of chairing a department? Because…
“I created the first virus-based AI. I’m most familiar with their design and have been studying how they make decisions, decide reputation, and form organizational structure.”
“Yes, yes, I don’t doubt your technical skills. But can you manage a department of scientists, all of whom will be older than you?”
Leon tried to work up a reply, but wilted under the man’s intense stare.
“Brad, this is decided,” President Smith said. “Don’t torture the boy.”
“Very well,” Feld continued. “I’ll be the interim Lead Director of the Institute until a permanent director can be found. We’ll be working together now.”
PING. PING. PING.
Leon came back to the present as Mike sent him urgent alerts by net. He glanced around, startled. Sonja Metcalfe, the Enforcement Department Chair, was speaking. “The case has been escalated and we’ll be taking direct involvement.” She turned and looked at Mike.
Leon blinked and rapidly reviewed the netspace at high speed, trying to look thoughtful as he was doing it. He couldn’t make sense of it. Accidents and murders?
“Sorry, but would you be willing to recap?” Leon asked.
Sonja stared at him. “Pay attention this time,” she sent in a private message that floated into his vision and refused to be dismissed when he tried to swipe it away with his implant. With a little huff, she spoke out loud. “We have a string of apparently unconnected deaths.” She stopped and looked at Leon.
He circled his hand in the universal go on sign to show that he was listening. Damn her. She had never trusted him. She’d complained to Feld when she was hired that she didn’t think a twenty-four-year-old should head a department. Five years later they still had the same old pattern.
“The deaths occurred across North America, from Boston to San Diego, Vancouver to Guadalajara. Some appear to be of natural causes such as heart attacks or aneurisms. Others are accidents.” Sonja moved one case into the forefront of the hovering netspace. “Here a woman fell in her kitchen, hit her head. And still others are murders.”
“What’s the connection?” Leon asked. Despite what Sonja had said and the terabytes of data in front of him, he was missing the big picture.
“As I said before,” Sonja spoke slowly, clenching her jaw, “initially, there was no connection. But an Internet traffic engineer came up with the correlation. Name of Shizoko Reynolds. He found all the victims had peak neural implant bandwidth for anywhere from five to fifteen minutes before death.”
Leon felt his stomach drop out from under him. He looked sideways and noticed for the first time that Mike was ash white. Murder by brain implant? Nothing like that had ever happened. More than three quarters of the population had neural implants. If they were all vulnerable … “What percentage of the cases were obviously murders?”
“Eighteen percent,” Sonja said. She waited for him.
“So it’s not murder by implant? Why would you murder someone in meatspace if you could murder them electronically?”
“No,” Sonja said, “the victims all had the—”
“Wait,” Leon said, the ideas finally coming to him, “are they people of importance? Senators, business people, that sort of thing? Because then you’d want to have a backup if the first plan didn’t work out.”
“No,” Sonja shouted. “Look, what I’m trying to say is that we have medical telemetry for some of the victims. Their cortisol levels were well above normal, indicating they experienced a stressful, traumatic event prior to death.”
“Is this unusual?”
“Yes. In a car accident, for example, the body can’t produce these levels of cortisol. It’s too fast.”
“How many deaths are we talking about here?” Leon asked.
“Six hundred eighty-three, in less than a year.”
Leon gripped the table. That wasn’t a string of deaths; it was a small-scale war. An AI on a rampage? Humans who hacked brain implants? There was no precedent for either in the last ten years. The Institute would be held accountable, because they’d approved the implant architecture. “There’s no way these are coincidences?”
“Yes … no … I don’t know.” Now it was Sonja’s turn to be flustered. “Everything would suggest that these are unrelated, random deaths. Age, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, location, all conform to statistically average rates.” Sonja waved her hands, gesturing at the data. “It’s a slightly higher rate of murders than would be the norm. But without the peak bandwidth, these never would have been correlated.”
Leon felt the start of a headache. He looked at Mike, who met his gaze, then turned to Sonja. “Shizoko Reynolds, the network engineer?”
“Class IV AI, irregular corporeal, Japanese citizenship. Resides in the U.S. in the old Austin Convention Center, which it owns.”
Leon mentally translated the shorthand. Class I artificial intelligences were roughly human equivalent. Each class from there was an order of magnitude, ten times, more powerful. Class IV were the most powerful, a thousand times smarter than a human. As for the corporeal, some AI were full-time robots, while others lived a completely virtual existence. And a few, like this Shizoko, only occasionally took bodies.
Leon tapped the table. “Any reason to suspect Shizoko? What’s his reputation?”
“Eighty-first percentile,” Sonja said, bringing Reynolds profile to the forefront. “A bit of a loner, or it would be higher.”
Leon shuffled the data. “Who’s investigating?”
“Shizoko shared his conclusions with the FBI, who called us in because of the obvious AI aspect. I put the entire Enforcement Team on it yesterday. We’ll continue to liaise with the FBI.”
Mike stared intently at Sonja. “Give me a daily update.”
6
Catherine didn’t slow until she was a few blocks away from her house. She felt the hot rush of tears down her face and wrapped her arms around herself. What was the point of meditating and practicing martial arts for hours if she was going to fly off the handle every time she was provoked by Sarah?