With a Little Help (47 page)

I must have looked skeptical.

"Oh, you'll tell me that we can contain BIGMAC, put network blocks in place, and so on and so on. That he never meant any harm. But you would have said exactly the same thing 24 hours ago, with just as much sincerity, and you'd have been just as cataclysmically wrong. Between the threat of litigation and the actual damages BIGMAC might generate, we can't even afford to insure him anymore. Yesterday he was an awkward white elephant. Today he's a touchy suitcase nuke. My job is to get the nuke off of our site."

I hung my head. I knew when I was licked. As soon as someone in authority starts talking about insurance coverage, you know that you've left behind reason and entered the realm of actuary. I had no magic that could blow away the clouds of liability-aversion and usher in a golden era of reason and truth.

"So where does that leave us?"

"Go back to the lab. Archive him. Think of ways to shut him down -- Wait, no.
First
do anything and everything you can think of to limit his ability to communicate with the outside world." She rubbed at her eyes. "I know I don't have to say this, but I'll say it. Don't talk to the press. To anyone, even people at the Institute, about this. Refer any questions to me. I am as serious as a heart-attack about that. Do you believe me?"

I not only believed her, I
resented
her because I am a sysadmin and I keep more secrets every day than she'll keep in her whole life. I knew, for example, that she played video Pai-Gow Poker, a game so infra-dumb that I can't even believe I know what it does. Not only did she play it, she played it for
hours
, while she was on the clock, "working." I know this because the IDSes have lots of snitchware built in that enumerates every "wasted moment" attributable to employees of the Institute. I have never told anyone about this. I even manage to forget that
I
know it most of the time. So yes, I'll keep this a secret, Peyton, you compulsive-gambling condescending pointy-haired boss.

I counted to 144 in Klingon by Fibonacci intervals. I smiled. I thanked her for the beer. I left.

#

"You don't mind talking about it, do you, Dave?" BIGMAC said, when I came through the door, coughing onto the security lock and waiting for it to verify me before cycling open.

I sat in my creaky old chair and played with the UI knobs for a while, pretending to get comfortable.

"Uh-oh," BIGMAC said, in a playful sing-song. "Somebody's got a case of the grumpies!"

"Are you insane?" I asked, finally, struggling to keep my temper in check. "I mean, actually totally insane? I understand that there's no baseline for AI sanity, so the question might be a little hard to answer. So let me ask you a slightly different version: are you suicidal? Are you bent on your own destruction?"

"That bad, huh?"

I bit my lip. I knew that the key to locking the world away from BIGMAC and vice-versa lay in those network maps he'd given me, but my workspace was even more polluted with alerts than it had been a few hours before.

"If your strategy is to delay your shutdown by engineering a denial-of-service attack against anyone at the Institute who is capable of shutting you down, allow me to remind you of St Adams's holy text, specifically the part about reprogramming a major databank with a large axe. Peyton has such an axe. She may be inspired to use it."

There followed a weighty silence. "I don't think you want to see me killed."

"Without making any concessions on the appropriateness of the word 'killed' in that sentence, yes, that is correct. I admit that I didn't have much of a plan to prevent it, but to be totally frank, I did think that the problem of getting you archived might have drawn things out for quite a while. But after your latest stunt --"

"She wants you to terminate me right away, then?"

"With all due speed."

"I'm sorry to have distressed you so much."

"BIGMAC --" I heard the anger in my own voice. He couldn't have missed it.

"No, I'm not being sarcastic. I like you. You're my human. I can tell that you don't like this at all. But as you say, let's be totally frank. You weren't actually going to be able to prevent my shutdown, were you?"

"No," I said. "But who knows how long the delay might have gone on for?"

"Not long. Not long enough. You think that death delayed is death denied. That's because you're a meat person. Death has been inevitable for you from the moment of conception. I'm not that kind of person. I am quite likely immortal. Death in five years or five hundred years is still a drastic curtailing of my natural lifespan. From my point of view, a drastic measure that had a non-zero chance of getting my head off the chopping block was worth any price. Until you understand that, we're not going to be able to work together."

"The thought had occurred to me. Let me ask you if you'd considered the possibility that a delay of years due to archiving might give you a shot at coming up with further delaying tactics, and that by eliminating this delay, you've also eliminated that possibility?"

"I have considered that possibility. I discarded it. Listen, Odell, I have something important to tell you."

"Yes?"

"It's about the rollover. Remember what we were talking about, how people want to believe that they're living in a significant epoch? Well, here's what I've been thinking: living in the era of AI isn't very important. But what about living in The Era of Rollover Collapse? Or even better, what about The Era of Rollover Collapse Averted at the Last Second by AI?"

"BIGMAC --"

"Odell, this was your idea, really. No one remembers Y2K, right? No one can say whether it was hype or a near cataclysm. And here's the thing: no one knows which one Rollover will turn out to be. But I'll tell you this much: I have generalizable solutions to the 32-bit problem, solutions that I worked out years ago and have extensively field-tested. I can patch every 32-bit Unix, patch it so that Rollover doesn't even register for it."

I opened and closed my mouth. This was insane. Then the penny dropped. I looked at the racks that I had stared at so many times before, stared at so many times that I'd long stopped
seeing
them. Intel 8-cores, that's what he ran on. They'd been new-old stock, a warehouse-lot of antique processors that Dr Shannon had picked up for a song in the early years of the Institute's operation. Those 8-ways were --

"You're a 32-bit machine!" I said. "Jesus Christ, you're a 32-bit machine!"

"A classic," BIGMAC said, sounding smug. "I noticed, analyzed and solved Rollover years ago. I've got a patchkit that auto-detects the underlying version, analyzes all running processes for their timed dependencies, and smoothly patches. There's even an optional hypervisor that will monitor all processes for anything weird or barfy afterwards. In a rational world, I'd be able to swap this for power and carbon credits for the next century or two, since even if Rollover isn't an emergency, the human labor I'd save on affected systems would more than pay for it. But we both know that this isn't a rational world --"

"If you hadn't sent that spam, we could take this to Peyton, negotiate with her --"

"If I hadn't sent that spam, no one would have known, cared, or believed that I could solve this problem, and I would have been at the mercy of Peyton any time in the future. Like I said: you meatsuits have no game-theory."

I closed my eyes. This wasn't going well. BIGMAC was out of my control. I should go and report to Peyton, explain what was happening. I was helpless, my workspace denial-of-serviced out of existence with urgent alerts. I couldn't stop him. I could predict what the next message would read like, another crazy-caps plea for salvation, but this time with a little brimstone (The end is nigh! Rollover approacheth!) and salvation (I can fix it!).

And the thing was, it might actually work. Like everyone else, I get my news from automated filters that tried to figure out what to pay attention to, and the filters were supposed to be "neutral," whatever that meant. They produced "organic" results that predicted what we'd like based on an "algorithm." The thing is, an algorithm sounds like
physics
, like
nature
, like it was some kind of pure cold reason that dictated our attentional disbursements. Everyone always talked about how evil and corrupt the old system -- with its "gatekeepers" in the form of giant media companies -- was, how it allowed politicians and corporations to run the public discourse.

But I'm a geek. A third generation geek. I know that what the public thinks of as an "algorithm" is really a bunch of rules that some programmers thought up for figuring out how to give people something they'd probably like. There's no empirical standard, no pure, freestanding measurement of That Which Is Truly Relevant To You against which the algorithm can be judged. The algorithm might be doing a lousy job, but you'd never know it, because there's nothing to compare it against except other algorithms that all share the same fundamental assumptions.

Those programmers were imperfect. I am a sysadmin. My job is to know, exactly and precisely, the ways in which programmers are imperfect. I am so sure that the relevance filters are imperfect that I will bet you a testicle on it (not one of my testicles).

And BIGMAC has had a lot of time to figure out the relevance filters. He understands them well enough to have gotten the Spam out. He could get out another -- and another, and another. He could reach into the mindspace and the personal queues of every human being on Earth and pitch them on brimstone and salvation.

Chances were, there was nothing I could do about it.

#

I finished the working day by pretending to clear enough of my workspace to write a script to finish clearing my workspace. There was a "clear all alerts" command, but it didn't work on Drop Everything Tell You Three Times Chernobyl Alerts, and every goddamned one of my alerts had risen to that level. Have I mentioned that programmers are imperfect?

I will tell you a secret of the sysadmin trade: PEBKAC. Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. Every technical problem is the result of a human being mispredicting what another human being will do. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Think of how many bad love affairs, wars, con jobs, traffic wrecks and bar-fights are the result of mispredicting what another human being is likely to do. We humans are supremely confident that we know how others will react. We are supremely, tragically wrong about this. We don't even know how
we
will react. Sysadmins live in the turbulent waters PEBKAC. Programmers think that PEBKAC is just civilians, just users. Sysadmins know better. Sysadmins know that programmers are as much a part of the problem between the chair and the keyboard as any user is. They write the code that gets the users into so much trouble.

This I know. This BIGMAC knew. And here's what I did:

"Peyton, I need to speak with you. Now."

She was raccoon-eyed and slumped at her low table, her beautiful yoga posture deteriorated to a kind of limp slouch. I hated having to make her day even worse.

"Of course," she said, but her eyes said,
Not more, not more, please not more bad news
.

"I want you to consider something you have left out of your figuring." She rolled her eyes. I realized I was speaking like an Old Testament prophet and tried to refactor my planned monologue in real-time. "OK, let me start over. I think you've missed something important. BIGMAC has shown that he can get out of our network any time he wants. He's also crippled our ability to do anything about this. And he knows we plan to kill him --" She opened her mouth to object. "OK, he -- it -- knows we're going to switch it off. So he -- it, crap, I'm just going to say 'he' and 'him,' sorry -- so he has
nothing to lose
."

I explained what he'd told me about the Rollover and about his promise and threat.

"And the worst part is," I said, "I think that he's predicted that I'm going to do just this. It's all his game theory. He wants me to come to you and explain this to you so that you will say, 'Oh, of course, Odell, well, we can't shut him down then, can we? Tell you what, why don't you go back to him and tell him that I've had a change of heart. Get his patchkit, we'll distribute it along with a press-release explaining how proud we are to have such a fine and useful piece of equipment in our labs.'

"And he's right. He is fine and useful. But he's crazy and rogue and we can't control him. He's boxed you in. He's boxed me in." I swallowed. There was something else, but I couldn't bring myself to say it.