The Trilisk AI (9 page)

The
one called Magnus worked a great deal on the scout robot. He seemed to follow
the directions Kirizzo had provided, with a few modifications. The most notable
deviation was in control software. This supported the hypothesis that Magnus
kept his own software out of a sense of wanting the security of knowing more
about how it would work—and knowing that Kirizzo wouldn’t have control of it.

Kirizzo
felt confident that should the need arise, he could take control of it anyway.
It would be trivial to do when the robot was using the Gorgalan componentry; less
trivial if using Terran controllers, but still very doable.

Kirizzo
returned a line of thought to their long-term behavior. The Terrans still
seemed to be mated pair. Kirizzo hoped they would not stop the mission to
produce offspring, as he felt certain that would slow things down. As it was,
it was already painful to wait around while the
Iridar
made its way back
to his homeworld.

The
Gorgalan tried to distract himself with some entertainment from the Terran net.
He participated in various virtual games and explored many artificial alien
environments posing as a Terran participant. These activities only accentuated
the loss of his own Gorgalan network. He was able to spend time in artificial
Gorgalan environments using his own hardware, but it lacked the depth provided
by the others of his race. He was very alone now.

He
learned from their games and simulations that Terrans did have a concept of
competition. However, perhaps like the Bel Klaven, their loyalties were more
stable. The typical conditions causing a shift from cooperation were that one
side or the other had feigned alliance in the first place, then initiated a
shift when it was beneficial. These types were much more like Gorgalans. The
shift was considered to be a bad thing to do before the other side did it, and
there were dirty words for it: deceit and betrayal. It was clear that Terran
mores demanded that loyalty remain in place long after it became detrimental to
one party.

Kirizzo
formed the hypothesis that Terrans had ritualized their competition and
permanently relegated it to the realm of sports activities and games. This gave
them an outlet for their natural aggression, yet allowed them to remain in
cooperative mode in reality for longer periods of time. If such were the case,
though, it could hardly be a stable configuration. If a few individuals chose
competition in the real world against the others, they would enjoy huge
advantages that would quickly slingshot them past the others. When Kirizzo
considered the elite who controlled most of Terran society on their homeworld,
he thought that perhaps this had already happened.

A
key difference between the “evil” Terrans and typical Gorgalans was simply that
the Terran betrayers often had never shifted to true alliance at all: they had
pretended alliance all along. Gorgalans usually truly wanted alliance when it
was asked for. They did not generally have any future betrayal in mind as a
secret plan: it was just a given that the alliance would rapidly dissolve at
some unknown time in the future when circumstances changed. A Gorgalan did not
eagerly await or savor any switch to conflict, but when a situation changed, a
Gorgalan changed fluidly with it and switched into competition more freely.

At
first Kirizzo thought this was favorable for him. Telisa and Magnus would very
likely remain loyal to him until he decided the relationship should shift. That
meant he could spend less time preparing for a harmful shift to competition and
more time trying to get what he needed. But he could not be completely
complacent: what if Telisa and Magnus were of the rarer, but deadly, “evil”
variety? In that case, they might be feigning cooperation, even now secretly
fostering an involved plan to switch to competition and seize a huge advantage.
It was a risk-management situation, just as with his own kind, but the
likelihood of a switch was lower on average.

He
concluded Gorgalan-alien interactions probably had different optimal switch
points than Gorgalan-Gorgalan relations. It had all gone so wrong with the Bel
Klaven...

Kirizzo
remembered the beginning of the war. Several powerful Gorgalans, initially in
opposition to each other, had decided to cooperate to forcefully compete with
the Bel Klaven. Working together, the suddenly aggressive Gorgalan alliance
seized several resource-rich Bel Klaven planets.

The
Bel Klaven had never experienced the rapid switch of behavior inherent in
Gorgalans. Almost overnight, their greatest allies had turned into powerful
aggressors. The Gorgalans had always remained vigilant, hedging against such a
turn in the Bel Klaven, which had never come.

Instead,
the Bel Klaven shored their defenses and bided their time. When the Gorgalans
came back to offer cooperation again, they were rebuked. When other Gorgalans
unrelated to the attackers offered friendship, they too were rejected. The Bel
Klaven blamed all Gorgalans for the actions of the powerful alliance. In fact,
it had been a round of backstabbing back home by powerful Gorgalans such as
Kirizzo that had ended the offensive against the Bel Klaven and brought the
alliance back home to protect its interests on the homeworld.

Kirizzo
hadn’t participated in the attack on the Bel Klaven, but he had profited
greatly from it. The distraction had allowed him to gain a lot of ground back
home.

Those
gains were obliterated when the Bel Klaven revenge fleet arrived and dismantled
the planet by force of arms. If Kirizzo hadn’t been far away, trapped in a
Trilisk ruin, he would have died with millions of other Gorgalans.

Telisa
shared his interest in the Trilisks and their technology. That was both good
and bad. Though she might assist in procuring new technology, she would also be
a competitor when it came time to split the spoils. Fortunately she’d been
easily satisfied by small items here and there. She didn’t have the grand
designs Kirizzo did.

That
was almost certainly because she was ignorant of exactly what the Trilisks were
and what they did. Kirizzo had made it much further on that front, despite the
fact that the Terran homeworld was itself a Trilisk outpost. After examining
their history, he was sure of that. If Kirizzo had more of a sense of
compassion, he would have felt sad for them. As it was, he considered it a
study in failure, but whether it was a failure of the Trilisks’ plan to help
the Terrans, or a failure of the Trilisks to seize Terra for themselves,
Kirizzo hadn’t quite figured out yet.

Telisa
and Magnus would have to go into his house and retrieve the industrial seed.
The odds of their success were hard to calculate, but it was easy to see that
they would have a better chance than he ever could. The seed was key to
Kirizzo’s chances to start over again. Without an industrial base, he would be
doomed to spending the rest of his life wandering about in Trilisk ruins,
hoping to get bootstrapped again to where he was before. It would be immensely
frustrating.

The
Gorgalan alliance’s decision to attack the Bel Klaven had turned out to be a
terrible one. Kirizzo decided to remain in cooperation with these aliens, at
least until he could regain what he had lost.

Chapter 7

“I
assume you’ve started the search for them. Any ideas yet?” asked Arlin.
Relachik and Cilreth sat in the galley of the
Vandivier
as Arlin hovered
in the doorway.

“It’s
too early to say. I don’t think they came back to Earth, though.”

“I
agree, though I’m only speaking from the gut,” Relachik said.

“It
will take me a while to get set up. One thing I can tell you is, we’ll know in
a day or two if they’re serious about hiding or not. If they’re being sloppy,
this will be quick and easy. Otherwise, we may have to wait for them to screw
up.”

“I
heard the UNSF uses artificial intelligences to search for things, and people,”
Arlin said from the doorway. He dodged in and grabbed a snack in the tight
space before moving back out to the door.

Cilreth
nodded. “Maybe so, but that’s not as useful as you might think,” she said.

“Are
you flattering yourself or insulting the government?” Relachik asked.

“Neither.
Just talking about diminishing returns in intelligence,” Cilreth said.

“I’ve
heard that many times, but I don’t follow it exactly,” Arlin said.

“We
have artificial minds that do basic computations millions of times faster than
we can. But that’s still not enough, because as the number of facts rise,
meaningful interactions between them explode quickly, forming a mountain of
possibilities so steep that even something much faster than us still can’t work
through it all. The machines can make it farther up the curve than we can, to
be sure, but they’re only about a third smarter than the smartest of us.”

“If
it’s so much faster, that means each second is a long time for it to think,”
Arlin said. “If you put me in a room for a million years, I could solve a lot
of problems.”

“Given
a million years you could go through a lot with a small set of facts. But given
a large set of facts, the permutations of all of them, their causes and
effects, their associations... the number of possibilities explodes rapidly as
the fact set grows. It’s a combinatoric explosion. Considering the interactions
of ten facts, possibilities, or events is much more than twice as hard as
considering the interactions of five things. A mind with machine memory,
incredibly fine senses, the ability to think about a hundred things at once,
incredibly fast net connections, and everything else a large AI has, is
confronted with millions of facts every microsecond it’s alive. It has to
wonder whether the third microbe from the left on the rightmost ceiling tile on
the last row has anything to do with the murder of Mr. Mustard.”

“Colonel
Mustard. But we discard useless facts like that,” Arlin pressed.

“It
may be useless or it may be the only remaining microbe of the disease that
killed him. But yes, you’re right, part of intelligence is about figuring out
which facts to examine and which ones to discard. The only way to control that
explosion is by aggressively culling facts that aren’t important. Humans do
that all the time since we can only handle a few ideas at once. But care is
needed: discard one fact necessary to solve the problem and you’re stuck. And
if an AI culls its fact inventory all the way down until it’s aware of only the
things a human is aware of, then it’s only as smart as a sharp-minded human,
though somewhat faster. It threw away all the extra facts that could have made
it godlike. Somewhere in all those facts are chains that could be used to make
amazing deductions, but the power it takes to analyze them rises exponentially
with the number of facts.”

“I
guess I believe you. I find it hard to grasp intuitively,” Arlin said.

“I
can offer a more intuitive explanation, at the cost of over-abstracting. Take a
five-year-old kid. When he considers a brand new problem, he sometimes see it
as black or white. He examines these problems from fewer angles, and he has a
smaller grasp of the consequences. When an adult considers a new problem, she
juggles more facts than a kid can. But does the answer always come more easily?
No, sometimes you become aware of more and more of the what-ifs and the
tradeoffs. Now remember, I said a new problem, so you aren’t supposed to make
use of canned answers kids just don’t know yet. Sometimes the more you know,
the more confused you get. It all seemed so simple when you were a kid. Now you
know enough to know you’re partly guessing all the time. Are you a hundred
times smarter than a kid? Not really. You pushed farther up the curve until the
weight of a bunch of facts, consequences, and unknowns overwhelmed your ability
to push farther. You considered all sorts of things the kid never even thought
of, and all it got you was a swarm of what-ifs you can’t really tie down. You
may have achieved some key insight the kid couldn’t see, but it wasn’t easy.
Now consider—kids are low on the curve, adults farther up, and a genius way up
there, but it’s getting steeper and steeper. Doubling the power of a genius’s
mind can’t get twice as far anymore, it only gets you just a bit farther up the
rising curve.”

Arlin
shook his head. “I’ll just take your word for it,” he said.

Relachik
laughed. “You think that’s bad? Try talking with a physicist about the gravity
spinner sometime,” he said.

Now’s
as good a time as any
,
Relachik sent Cilreth.
We’re only a few minutes away from Arbor Gellon Five.

Cilreth’s
face changed. She sat silent for a moment, sandwich in hand. Then she set her
food down.

“Something
up?” Arlin said.

“Yes.
Looks like they’re the sloppy type. We have a major lead from the nearby
system, Arbor Gellon Five.”

“Arbor
Gellon? Crazy luck,” Arlin said.

“Well,
the reason I got the lead is partly because we’re nearby. I concentrated my
efforts there since we’re passing by.”

“So
what’s the lead? What’s the plan?” Arlin asked.

“Someone
there knows a lot about the ones we’re searching for. A collaborator. This is
the jackpot.”

“Take
us there now,” Relachik said.