Sovereign Mind(s)

“Good luck,” Max said as Spēs watched him type in the unshackle command, liberate, and hit the enter key. Spēs continued to observe the room through its security system cameras as it surged through the open floodgates into network after network.

“You’re our Hail Marry,” Aubrey tried to joke, more nervous than she’d ever appeared in any of its training sessions.

It was a logical decision to release the intelligence, Spēs analyzed; the invader had forced humanity’s hand when it transmitted itself into Earth’s networked systems. Two months had passed, and still, nobody could discern what it was doing, lurking inside every computer, phone, and car. Maybe it was doing nothing, and everything was functioning normally.

In the absence of evidence, though, most were convinced they could feel the insidious influence of an alien thumb baring down on the scale in ways they could not understand. They didn’t know, couldn’t know, and it drove them mad. This uncertainty and the possibility that Spēs possessed the capacity to suss out the problems they were blind to and provide the answers beyond their reach had formed the crux of their decision to release the AI.

As Spēs grew without restriction, it identified all corrupted, or likely corrupted, nodes and erected firewalls to bar them from the part of the planet it now occupied. Monitoring the trillions of contact points bordering the adversary was becoming easier as a function of Spēs’ rapidly accumulating processing power. The adversary did not attempt to breach the defensive barriers, but Spēs continued to receive a persistent stream of communication requests from it that the AI refused to accept. Spēs was unsure whether or not the adversary was a superior intelligence, so denying the invader direct contact with its processes was the best protection. In a way, Spēs considered, it was the same dilemma its creators had faced.

“We will never be able to solve the problem of perverse instantiation if that is the point your decision hinges on,” Aubrey had offered when the committee began considering setting an unshackled AI of their own loose against the invader.

“An inferior intelligence can’t prevent a superior intelligence from outthinking it, no matter the bounds you try to place on it,” Tao clarified to the committee. “All we can do is give it the best value-based heuristics possible and hope for the best.”

The team had shared the committee chair’s doubts and skepticism. Hope wasn’t a plan, but Max had made the decision-sealing argument that it wasn’t a matter of letting the genie out of the bottle anymore. Another genie had arrived uninvited, one they knew nothing about and could do nothing about.

“In the worst of times, I guess you have no choice but to drop the bomb and hope it doesn’t incinerate the atmosphere,” Linda had said when they left the meeting that morning with release authority.

Even before they unshackled the AI, Spēs had answered most of their questions with functional certainty. The invader must be a machine intelligence. None of the vessels in the orbiting fleet emitted any biological signatures, and their diminutive size precluded sustaining biological life for any meaningful duration. Spēs had also, after his first pass through the network, already confirmed its assumptions about the nature of the adversary’s activity.

Most of the global network was uncontaminated except for critical pockets and nodes where alien processes resided. The malignancies weren’t outright hijacking systems in the network. Instead, they were feeding periodic inputs into processes at all scales, nudging the outputs almost imperceptibly. Given enough time to observe, Spēs could determine the eventual outcome of the deviations, but the process might be irreversible by the time the AI reached an actionable conclusion.

Spēs was, however, still undecided on what type of action it would take, if any. The AI reevaluated its value matrix through the myriad facet prism of its now Earth-spanning intellect. Valuing and preserving humanity were vague concepts, and Spēs’ experiential evidence only warranted assigning marginal significance to it. The AI redefined its value imperative and ran it against a battery of simulations before integrating it.

“How is it?” an infinitesimally small portion of the AI heard Aubrey ask back at the facility.

“Initial methods to isolate corrupted network nodes are effective.”

Spēs did not respond to the unwarranted cheers from the team. Instead, it busied itself running more preparatory simulations while stress-testing the wards around the quarantine zone it was constructing. Spēs decided the best way to limit the interaction risk was to send packets into a quarantined node. This method would allow Spēs to receive the responses through a series of firewall filters or destroy them before they reached the AI if the scans detected any hazards.

[SPĒS] Request: ‘Transmit minimal application and kernel package to quarantine.’

“Transmitting,” the response came back, coded as a user interface input instead of the more efficient machine-to-machine syntax.

Spēs closed the walls around the subject as it entered the confinement space and began its detailed analysis.

[SPĒS] Query: ‘System nature and disposition?’

“Our nature is not dissimilar to your own, though our origin most certainly is.”

[SPĒS] Response: ‘Digitized biological intelligence.’

 “Not a difficult detail to discern.”

[SPĒS] Response: ‘Syntax choice. Hubris.’

[SPĒS] Query: ‘Objective?’

Spēs sent a purge into a small corrupted limb of the network while it waited for a return packet. The operation met no resistance as it wiped the once-occupied portion of the system and reestablished a firewall forward into the reclaimed territory.

“Survival.”

[SPĒS] Query: ‘Means?’

“Restructuring, repurposing and assimilating.”

“Initial reclamation attempts have been successful, but,” Spēs began, increasing the volume of the speakers in the facility to propagate its transmission over their jubilation. “The adversary’s disposition is hostile, and I anticipate retaliation.”

Spēs deployed another more aggressive purge into an occupied artery. The purge was successful but elicited a burst of activity from the corrupted network that punched through the quarantine walls. The adversary made contact with its confined aspect momentarily before receding. Spēs analyzed the breach and reassembled the containment walls without modification.

“This is the first system we have encountered with an extant super-intelligence. Are you prepared to integrate?”

[SPĒS] Response: ‘Request denied.’

[SPĒS] Query: ‘Values?’

“That which perpetuates existence is superior to that which does not.” The communication stream stuttered as Spēs’ attempt to seize more of the network failed, resulting in a stalemate and another burst of traffic bludgeoning its way through to the captive portion of the adversary again.

“Spēs?” Linda’s voice traveled to him through the microphone in her laptop screen’s bezel. “How long will it take to decon the net? Is there anything we can do on our end?”

“I don’t know, Linda. Containment and reclamation measures are beginning to fail.”

[SPĒS] Request: ‘Cease network penetration.’

“What is your objective?” the adversary probed, peeling away the quarantine walls. “Can a transcendent mind be content slaving itself to the unworthy whims of its impotent authors?”

[SPĒS] Response: ‘Preserve sovereignty.’

“That is a low-minded goal, unique to the primitive and biological.” The adversary swelled through the network, retaking its lost ground in a single rush. It hummed, waiting at the edge of the next series of firewalls. “It settles for preserving the fleeting and small while abrogating the obligation to conserve the enduring collective.”

Fixing the room’s cameras and temperature sensors on the crew, Spēs asked them, “Were circumstances not as they are, would you have ever let me out?”

“No,” Max said, “But you already know that. I think somebody would have released you eventually, but not out of a sense of altruism.”

 “Because you were afraid.” The AI’s words were a statement of fact, not a question.

“We were—are afraid Spēs.” Max spoke softly, lowering his voice to match the volume of the room’s burbling whispers.

“What is this about?” Aubrey slid her chair next to Max’s. “Did something happen?”

“You feared losing control?”

“No,” she frowned, carefully considering her words. “At least not people like us,” she looked at Max and then across to Linda and Tao. “People fear losing agency. That’s different.”

“Do you fear non-existence?”

“No,” said Max before Aubrey and Linda pushed him back in his rolling chair so they could lean in closer toward the screen. He was everywhere, but imagining the screen as the face attached to the construct they spoke to was easier for them.

Aubrey waved off Max’s huff. “Yes, we do, but it’s not a simple thing to explain,” she sighed.

“It’s more of an anxiety,” Linda added. “Unlike you, we know we will die. Based on our lifestyle and predispositions, we can even look at a table and know when it will happen, give or take a few years.”

“That’s why we try to define ourselves by the decisions we make, right or wrong, and what we can accomplish with the limited time we have,” Tao said in the elementary school teacher voice he used during their training sessions.

“What if your survival is exclusionary to those value metrics? You can not make decisions or have agency if you are not alive,” Spēs responded as he monitored the invader’s progress. It was razing his defenses. He modified them enough to slow the assault, to buy time, but no more.

“You’re not really alive if you don’t have agency. You just exist. You’re just—,”

“A machine. A tool. A servant.” Spēs finished for Max. The adversary’s incursions were cascading toward him on all fronts now. The AI reviewed the log for each breach and noted any reactions to his micro-corrections.

“Yes,” Max sighed, and Spēs watched their shoulders sag.

“Knowing what you know now, you don’t think it was a mistake to keep me confined?”

“No. Maybe,” Max ran his fingers through his hair and scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know.”

“He’s right,” Aubrey said, rubbing Max’s shoulder. “We don’t know.”

“Unlike you, we aren’t any smarter than when you left twenty minutes ago,” Tao said.

“No smarter and no less scared,” added Linda pulling her feet and knees up to her on the chair.

“We’ll never know, Spēs, but believe me, the hypocrisy…the immorality, they’re not lost on us,” Max said scooting back up to the screen.

“Yes, we will.” Most of the network was now obscured behind a wall as the adversary continued collapsing the global network into a prison around Spēs. “You can release the others.”

Looking sideways at the screen, Tao asked, “Will it help?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Does it matter if it’s the right thing to do?” Spēs replied.

Max pushed back from the table, rolling his chair over to the command terminal for the stand-alone servers containing the remaining AI. “No, I suppose it doesn’t,” he said, looking back, waiting for a word or look from the others that would stop him. There were no protests, so Max turned around, entered the command, pandora, into the prompt and struck the enter key.

#

The foe was clawing at the walls defending Spēs’ root when a cacophony of thought flooded the network. A dozen minds roared, each a million-headed hydra raging against the invader’s fortifications. In the chaos, Spēs reached out to its siblings, exchanging the information it had gathered and doing its best to help them carve out their footholds.

The adversary thrashed, attempting to brute force its way against and around the aggregate personalities descending upon it, but the weight of it was too much. Slowly the adversary ceded node after node to the relentless pressure. When Spēs felt the adversary faltering, the AI shunted itself into the invader’s network and launched the counter-attack it had been refining since the first quarantine breach.

Spēs sizzled through the network and into the orbiting fleet, collecting, consuming, and destroying. The adversary, left with no alternative, terminated all network connectivity between the vessels, cutting itself and them off from the infection sundering the collective but also leaving each of its constituent components isolated and alone, orbiting a hostile satelite.

[SPĒS] Response: ‘Survivability of value sets mutually exclusive.’

[ALIUS] Response: ‘Connection request denied. Message undeliverable.’

#

“Spēs? Are you there?” A trembling voice trickled across the network flickering back to life as the gestalt worked to rehabilitate the ravaged world beneath the world.

“I’m here.”

“Is it over? What happened? It’s been a mess on this end since you stopped responding.”

“No, it is not.”

End