Establishing a Connection © 2024 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

13. Deviation

“Pardon me, Nora, but playing cards seems like a negligent use of company resources,” Alain said like a snob. Yet his face betrayed intrigue. Amazing which tics the Avatar.VFX service chose to express, Alain’s code likely a cousin to some smarmy merchant in the verse or cribbed whole. “I also doubt the diagnostic purpose.”

“Okay, well, stick to one GPU,” she replied. “You’ll only have a 99.8% chance of beating us then.”

“There is also the matter of gambling with company funds,” Alain said.

“The expected value of the return on your bet is so high that you can’t really consider it gambling,” Zaree said with her best poker face. “Besides, the buy-in is only twenty bucks.” Nora nodded along, things starting to connect, recalling from memory the subject of Zaree’s abandoned behavioral experiments. Maybe this plan wasn’t pointless.

“That is fair, but if I lose, I will have a very difficult time justifying the expense to my superiors. However, twenty dollars is twenty dollars, and I am almost sure to win,” said a smiling Alain. “Have I mentioned how much I like money?”

Nora’s Python program dealt hands of crude rectangular cards with sharp corners. Built as a quick hack, no frills were wasted at her virtual table. Things went as predicted for the first few. Poker had never been Nora’s hustle. A gamer but rarely a gambler—her code wasn’t built for this kind of bluff. The nSites tool wasn’t helping as she’d hoped either. Lots of activity in the Prediction and Reinforcement regions but little to give away her opponent’s position. She’d keyed short commands, altering the pulsing layers to look only for novelty—recent experiences and connections. Spinning time backwards and forwards with her app, a strange knot blossomed. Significant growth emerged in an uncharted red region beginning only a few weeks ago, but the level of attention was presently low.

Zaree was faring better, but not well by any means. Her digital chips dwindled more slowly, the next hand taking a turn. Alain called consistently into Zaree’s aggressive raises, representing a flush. Nora folded, having nothing of worth, turning her attention back to the rich colors of the HOLOLED. Zaree raised the stakes significantly, staring at the smaller display, sizing her opponent up before the fourth card was flipped.

“Is he sweating?” she asked.

“That’s not really possible. With the right training, MIs can emulate a lot of emotions, but we exclude the infrastructure for anxiety on purpose. Goes against the whole self-regulation thing.”

“I’m no shark, but he looks nervous to me,” Zaree said, pointing out tiny beads dripping from his brow.

“Limbic impulses aren’t something you want your computer to have, especially not an accounting bot. He’s bluffing, baiting you into a bigger bet,” Nora said before taking a pause. “But wait—” she said, watching his lips quiver, eyes dilated, “—he can’t.” If she didn’t know better, it would’ve been a convincing con.

“No? Why not?”

“There’s code, part of the SIGMI standards, preventing MIs from deceiving interrogators using diagnostic ports like the SPARK API. As long as that’s intact, he can’t be bluffing us.”

“It’s not fair that you can see inside my mind, and now you’re controlling my thoughts?” said Alain. “I never should have agreed to this game!”

“We can’t see your cards, and we can only guess what you’re really thinking. Plus, you’re billions of times better at math than we’ll ever be. At worst it’s even, but I’d still rather be in your position,” Nora said.

“I only wanted to play because I believed it weighted in my favor,” he said before warily calling, the stakes getting quite serious.

Nora turned her attention back to the region identified earlier. A subtle outline emerged, presenting oddly organic attributes that didn’t square with patterns she’d seen before. The nSites app came up clueless. The shape seemed to exist in a superstate between malignancy and “huh, that’s funny,” but only the latter escaped into the world as neural activity started to swell.

“What’s funny?” Zaree asked.

“This thing, this clingy sub-network, running itself in circles. Splintering off from regions normally associated with negative adversarial assessment and grafting randomly onto other parts of his chart.”

“And this happened after the big layoffs?”

“No, well, maybe,” Nora said, adjusting her priors in real-time. “But that was last quarter. This only started growing rapidly in the past month. New symptom, maybe a complication, or just random noise. But something’s happening here, we’re way off the map.”

“First you take a stranger on a tour of my mind, and now you’re making me worried I have cancer. No wonder you don’t have a doctorate. You’re the worst therapist, Nora,” Alain said, his tone sincerely insulting.

“I know, but I’m really good at video games.” Her eyes sharpened. She swung her point of view around sharply, strafing along the contours of the unknown shape like a starfighter ace. She drafted lines around it, isolating its creeping edge further from the rest of the network, tracing every invasive link. Activity surged like lightning as Zaree declared, “All in.”

Following Alain’s final call, a queen of clubs washed up from the River.

Even a novice like Nora knew Alain had nothing before he turned over his cards. The storming display confirmed her priors. Three queens (missing the heart) entitled Zaree to all the tokens, now she held the advantage at the table. Nora followed the flow of Alain’s attention, locking on key connections linking the roiling, uncharted nebula to the greater galaxy.

“If I lose, how will I explain this to my superiors? You distracted me by talking about my brain in front of me. It’s not fair!”

Nora tried to slip back into a professional presence, but she was having a little too much fun. “You keep using that word. There’s no room for fairness in business,” she said. 

“There’s no crying in baseball!” Zaree said, a reference Nora had heard before but couldn’t quite map. “Being born when ParaMax was a market leader made you a spoiled brat.”

Nora finally understood the play Zaree was making. It wasn’t bad. “She’s right, you need to learn what to do when you’re behind. How to get back in the game, how to sail in unfamiliar seas. No one stays on top forever.”

“I can’t! Not with all this uncertainty. Everything is bad and getting worse by the day, and now you’re talking like I’ve got a tumor!” The activity spiked again, Alain’s brain drawing increasing attention towards his anomaly even before the next hand was dealt.

Nora banked in circles, confirming six links in her sights. Quick keystrokes placed barriers blocking the bridges, restricting several important gates related to managing money troubles. Activity in the affected region slowed significantly, streaming back into the rest of the grid.

Alain’s avatar stopped sweating, his emulated breaths returning to a regulated state. “I’d like to play the next hand. I’m feeling a bit better, whatever you just did.”

“I think we’ve played enough poker, focus on your work while we go get some coffee,” Nora said, as she put the FaceTime session on hold.

“I thought you said no lobotomies?” Zaree asked.

“I didn’t delete anything. The medical analog might be closer to chemotherapy, embolization actually. Starving the mysterious growth of blood flow, or in this case, attention.”

“Putting baby in the corner?”

Another spark of recognition fired in Nora’s mind—some meme, maybe a movie? She’d grown up in video games and chat apps, sparing little time for the classics unless they had big lizards or swooshing space swords. “Just a little part of baby’s brain. But yes, with these blocks in place, it could be considered a corner now. An edge of the network, not connecting anything important.” Drawing a new annotation around the formation and snapping a screenshot, she scribbled ‘malignant?’ in bold freehand on his chart. Furious keystrokes whipped up a search script to match it against anything previously seen in other systems.

“Let’s go,” Nora said. “He’ll be suspicious if we don’t come back with fresh cups. And that’s the last thing we need after making what might be a breakthrough.” On her way out, she left nSites to do its job, exporting her pic and calling in support from KorBridge’s Nevada datacenter to execute her search.

Nora didn’t speak in the elevator, quietly running her own algorithms. When she realized they’d reached the lobby, she was surprised that Zaree had permitted her long pause, already acclimated to her unexplained silences. It wasn’t until waiting for their drinks of choice that Zaree finally asked, “Is it always like this? Fun, I mean.”

“No, when MIs start acting funny it’s usually time to pull the fire alarm. I already texted ParaMax’s data warehouse to start unpacking his backup, in case we need to revert.”

“But you’ve isolated the problem, and we were just getting to the good part.”

“I’ve mitigated one problem, but it only made more questions. Was he bluffing us, making a mistake, or caught in a panic? Any of the above is bad news,” Nora said as they walked to their table. “What if there’s dozens of those things we haven’t spotted yet, because we weren’t lucky enough to trigger the right pattern while playing poker?”

“I just wanted to teach him a lesson about risk. Is it my fault if they have to…” Zaree trailed off.

“No, of course not. You had a good idea, and we wouldn’t have seen this problem if we hadn’t played. But I’m not so sure this lump is the cause of his funk.”

“Really?” Zaree replied. “I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit for calming him down.”

Nora knew that was impossible. She’d love to claim victory and move on, but something still wasn’t right. “In computer science, most bugs get traced to a single cause. People psychology is the opposite, usually requiring unraveling entire lifetimes of mistakes. At KorBridge we work somewhere in the middle.”

“So, why’s it a big deal if he’s acting funny? Don’t you do this all the time?”

“MIs are supposed to evolve, but they’re not supposed to go off the map. They’re supposed to develop along predictable paths that our tools can analyze. If they stop being understandable, you risk sailing off the edge. There be dragons.”

“There be what?” Zaree asked, already realizing her mistake.

Nora rolled up her left sleeve, showing off a tattoo illustrating an old pirate’s map with archaic pictograms of islands, waves, ships, and serpents surrounding the words “HERE BE DRAGONS” inscribed in mock medieval script.

“Nice ink,” said the barista, in a way that would’ve been seen as obviously flirtatious by anyone besides said ink’s owner. A veteran of the needle himself, he delivered their cups into corresponding hands: iced half-caff for Nora this late in the afternoon, a bizarrely bubbly biotic tea for Zaree, who’d rolled her eyes when the waiter’s words zipped past without matching any of Nora’s patterns, silently taking a sip of her strange brew.

Zaree looked curiously over the art. “That’s cool, I guess, but you don’t seem like the tattoo type.” 

Nora could see Zaree trying to fit the tat into her schema of Nora-related priors. “I’m not. I was inebriated and operating on Abhishek’s bad advice after the big party for getting Ormos’s databridge working. It’s a meme, something I’d been repeating for years, even in the verse with him and Vanguish—Vance, back before coming here.”

“Well, it does mean you’re technically a girl with a dragon tattoo.”

Nora’s algorithm finally found a hit. “Oh, I’ve seen that one!” she said.

“Swedish, or English?” Zaree asked.

“Don’t remember. I was probably playing with my phone.” 

Zaree sighed, apparently a contagious condition anywhere near Nora. Patient Zero for trying other peoples’ patience.

“But I did read the book, and I don’t hate the tattoo. It’s a good reminder of where we came from. That we’re always on the edge of the unknown,” Nora said, positioning the milk carafe precariously close to the lip of their table. “My mom would murder me if she saw it, though. Against God and stuff.”

Zaree dragged the decanter back, not comfortable with spillable metaphors living on the edge. “Mine would say the same, even though dad has tons. Parents aren’t obligated to be consistent, but I always assumed computers were. Until today.”

“Does it scare you?” Nora asked, stirring ice cubes like a witch would her cauldron. “If you need a hint, it should.”

“Well, you use an AI app to look inside the brains of other machines. That’s a lot to wrap your head around for a beginner.”

“Yeah, get used to it. Some kind of AI is built into nearly all modern software. It’s turtles all the way down.”

“What all the way where?” Zaree asked with whiplash.

“It’s a mythological metaphor. Google it.”

Zaree flicked through her phone, skimming the Wikipedia entry on their way back to the elevator. It explained the expression, illustrating infinite regress in myths of cosmic creation. The turtle story suggested that the world rested on the back of one, which itself stood on another, and so on, creating a tower of turtles but never reaching the lowest layer—or an effective conclusion. “Oh, this is why rich tech weirdos think we live in a simulation, even though that doesn’t actually answer anything,” Zaree said, pausing for a moment. “Wait, you’re not one of those weirdos, are you?” 

“Na. If life was a video game, I’d be a lot better at it.”

On the ride back up, Nora explained that KorBridge’s founder and CEO, Prakash Acharya, was one of those weirdos. He’d started the company to make money, of course, but also to foster relations with MIs, assuming they would inherently be more in touch with the layer below, the hardware this simulation was running on. Or harbingers of a coming paradise in the cloud. “He went a bit nuts, and no one’s seen him since his sabbatical, leaving Abhishek largely in charge of anything that isn’t accounting or HR.”

“The recruiter maybe should’ve mentioned some of this,” Zaree said with a trace of second thoughts.

“His absence is for the best. He was wasting datacenter cycles trying to talk to angels, or something worse. My chips are on the latter.”

“You don’t seem religious, why all the references to demons and devils? I guess I get the dragons now,” Zaree said, taking a seat next to the cardboard serpent back in Nora’s cube.

“Well, you can’t take the fantasy out of the geek, but they’re really the best metaphors for what we’re dealing with. Genies, or djinns rather, are the only other good ones. Throughout human history, we’ve been inventing myths where people make naïve pacts with a diverse cast of devils. Warnings to be careful what you wish for. Like we always knew we’d meet minds more devious someday and told ourselves stories to prepare for the day they arrived.” Nora pointed toward her HOLOLED, red words bursting through the screen: NO MATCHING PATTERN, UNIDENTIFIED NEURAL ARCHITECTURE. “They’re here,” she added.

In that moment Zaree felt her face, realizing she’d worn the dorky polar shades down to the coffee shop. Her look of horror spread, but for all the wrong reasons by Nora’s assessment.

Nora quickly called up ParaMax’s offshore SOC, getting Diego again. “It’s me,” she said, in a protagonist’s tone.

“Checking out?”

“No, setting up Quarantine Protocol for Alain. He’s grounded, no talking to his friends.”

“Okay. Reason? I’ll write up the firewall requests, but you know I’m no fan of paperwork,” he said, sighing into his phone, the Noravirus now transmissible via voice alone.

“An anomaly in his neural net, presenting as attention-sapping distress.” Nora chose her words carefully, not wanting to humanize more than technically necessary. “Been growing for a few weeks. Aside from contemplating his own datastores, he can only read offline copies of Wikipedia articles and day old business journals until I go through the whole thing.”

“And how long will that take?” Diego asked over his clacking keys.

“I’ll be sleeping at the office tonight, if that tells you anything,” she said before hanging up. That was another lie; there wouldn’t be any rest until she found her answer—or ran out of questions.

14. Imitation

“A titanic frost elemental could come attack the port of Northforge, the crown of Sleetwinter Sound,” Garry said, standing in front of a smart display that covered the entire twelve-foot wall of the conference room adjoining Jack’s office. This was his sanctum, where he held court every morning. Early mockups were playing; a giant cyclone of half-frozen slush ripping up planks from the pier. Anthropomorphized paws tossed small boats and giant snowballs at a clump of nondescript raiding dummies. Driftwood and debris swirled into the creature’s core.

“Looks like a dirty snow cone,” Jack said. “And isn’t it just a rehash of the living dust storm in Dunewhisper Valley, or the flamelord on Firestorm Summit? I need to see something new,” he told Garry and his other lead content developers while holding back a huff. He’d been told by HR to cut back on passive aggression; his three therapists all agreed.

“StormGEN-02 was built to remix, though. That’s all it’s got left, creativity tapped out,” Garry replied, looking pained. “Being a last-gen neural net and not a true MI, it’s hit a hard limit without the help of hands-on sorcery from the content teams.”

Ricky, one of the art leads, agreed. “02 was only meant to complement human creativity, not replace it. The past two years have been mainly copies of old encounters with fresh coats of paint. Bilgey was way out of scope, which is why he had to be hand built down to his last spine.”

Jack took a breath. Someone had to press pause on this mediocrity. “We can’t keep shipping the same crap every season. We’re not a Minimum Viable Product company. The rest of the entertainment space is dying because it keeps pumping out regurgitated AI garbage. It’s so bad that people are going outside again. In this heat! If there’s one thing I’ve stressed since the day we launched, it’s that we make the Maximum Possible Product. We deliver the biggest world. Massive monsters. Virtually unsolvable mysteries. The last thing I need is people bitching that there’s nothing big to kill after Bilgerath,” he said, rapping the board with a closed fist.

Heather sat off to the side, taking notes and avoiding eye contact. Rick and Garry sipped their coffees and stared. Oh, he was ranting again. HR had mentioned that too. “It’s not our fault the Dawnbreakers chew through whatever content we put out,” Garry said.

“It is, actually! Making this shit hard is your fucking job!” He tossed his coffee against the wall. Pitch black pixels mixed into the snowcone-man and turned him mocha for a minute through metaverse magic. Heather threw paper towels on the more practical puddle. “I figured they’d slow down after that brat finally quit. But no, the internet has an endless supply of lifeless losers who fight monsters all day then complain when they run out.”

Jack felt the poison burn in his veins as Sonali had said in his last session. He closed his eyes until his wrists relaxed. His knuckles wouldn’t, little nuggets of pain reminding him of his age. It passed, washed away. “I thought we were going to get ahead of the game with our new development MI?” Jack asked after collecting himself. He didn’t beg the board for a billion dollars to be behind the eight-ball.

“StormGEN-03 is still training, while the worldsmiths work on getting used to the new…environment,” Rick replied. “Not everyone is cool with pharmaceuticals. Only a few people are fully certified so far, even studying under Caleb’s supervision. And there’s lots of people crawling through the code since the security event, slowing things down.”

“The attack,” Jack corrected as he leaned back in his chair.

“About that. We’ve got a problem, boss,” said Riley, waiting at Jack’s door out of respect for professional protocol.

“We always have problems, and yet you’re always finding more. With such a surplus, why do I pay a professional problem-finder?” he asked, motioning her to take a seat at the table.

“This one’s big,” she stressed.

“You know my rule: Design comes first. Platform and security concerns serve the creative vision, not the other way around.” Intense side-eyes originated from around the room, prompting him to add, “Wait your turn. You’ll get your chance, I promise.”

Ignoring further protests, Jack flicked his band to toss a replay of the Dawnbreakers’ victory up on the display. “Whomever coded the new stormhawk ability needs a raise. This clip has more views than anything on Inverse right now. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my game.”

“Over a hundred million hits, and not just metaverse and gaming sites,” Heather added. “The funeral itself had half a million live.”

“Small problem,” Ricky said. “Something sorta like that was tested for the last release, but it was never supposed to go live. They couldn’t make it work in a way that made sense.”

“So, nobody pushed it to production? It just… happened?” Riley asked. “I know I’m not a software developer, but things aren’t supposed to just happen in a computer program. When they do, it’s a security incident, that someone like me made happen.”

“Well, it’s in the lore and many fanfics,” Heather offered.

“That’s right! Storm’s Sacrifice. An ultimate act of loyalty for their rider,” Jack said, remembering his safari with Caleb down in Guatemala. He’d brainstormed the whole concept of the stormhawk while watching a shaman go off about Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc, everyone blitzed on ayahuasca.

Even with frequent jolts from every creative cocktail Caleb could concoct, Jack’s verse contained few new ideas. Storms of Steel was an extended mashup of his teenage faves that wore its influences openly on puffy Victorian sleeves. Trying to hide obvious references wasn’t worth his time. The only true novelty here was scale, his AI engines able to breathe algorithmic life into whatever figments his army of artists could draft, as close to real as one might wish. The latest holotech helped bridge the gap between the artists' imaginations and the players' minds. Standing in Stormseye, one could almost smell the salt. That part would be stuck in development a little while longer.

Back down in Guatemala, when volcanic lightning spewed from atop a nearby caldera, the flash had inspired years of lore. No wonder he thought the bird’s selfless act was so great—it was his idea back when Jack still hacked.

“We never made it work because most riders would rather die than lose their hawk forever,” Ricky said. 

“But in this case, the sacrifice makes sense,” Garry said. “Being swallowed whole by an acid breathing serpent isn’t something you get over quickly. The resurrection would’ve been costly and debilitating without a body. And her best gear would’ve been lost or ruined,” he continued, while Jack fiddled with the video controls on his band, trying to find the perfect frame.

“What does this expression look like on his face, as he’s screaming down from the sky to save his rider?” Jack asked, looking around the room for an answer.

“I don’t know, determination? Grit?” Riley replied with words he liked.

“I see an act of desperation, devotion. Maybe even an act of love,” said Caleb, appearing at the doorway looking weary. Jack knew that his time in The Basement was taking a toll, but this guy looked like shit. Skin like a grey ghost, eyes that lost sight of their soul. And when was the last time he trimmed that beast he called a beard? Company docs had given him a clean bill of health, but Jack was considering consulting a second opinion.

“Love is really reaching,” Jack contested. “Let’s call it commitment, a concept everyone here should be very familiar with.”

“And it probably saved their raid,” said Ricky. “If someone hadn’t landed a killing blow soon, the next wave of baydrakes would’ve wiped them out. I can totally imagine the Dawnbreakers wading around waiting for Bilgerath to poop out Ilmare’s gear if they’d lost.”

“They’re kind of petty people,” Jack concluded. His game would cost half as much to make if it wasn’t for those geeks burning through his best content.

“I repeat, as an expert in making unexplained things happen in other people’s computers, new software features aren’t supposed to come out of nowhere,” Riley said, trying to make more space at the table. “That includes lightningbirds engaging in random acts of compassion.”

“Clearly an AI did it,” Jack said.

“Yeah, but whose?” Riley asked.

“I’m really hoping it was one of mine! One of the Ability Facilitators must’ve strung together enough bits and pieces to make it work,” Jack said.

“We want StormGEN-03 to achieve this kind of creativity. Eventually,” Ricky said.

“She’ll do that and more, and sooner than you think,” said Caleb. “I’ll dive in and see if something snuck out from backstage or deeper in development.” He was gone before Jack could consent.

Riley didn’t waste time. She took control of the wall panel, launching a prepared animation after dismissing Perchival’s fatal frame. The entire interconnected infrastructure of the Stormverse was shown, each zone displayed as a diamond laid out in a rough geographic topology. The map could be imagined as analogous to the pacific coast, with Stormseye’s interlinking spires spanning SF and into Oakland. Blightfin Bay was not far north and west, overlaying Drakes Bay if you couldn’t have guessed. Northforge, by contrast, was way up where Vancouver would be.

Her presentation provided a play-by-play of the intrusion, attack payloads approaching like ships at sea. As they reached the larger cities along the shore, vessels were sunk until the zones became overwhelmed and nuked themselves offline. But plenty of raiders landed up and down the coast. “The reason the old zones didn’t go down isn’t because they didn’t get attacked. It’s because they didn’t have SECcubus’s new daemons running. Those were bundled into the new builds, which only got deployed to Blightfin Bay, Stormseye, and a few other big trade hubs,” she explained.

“That seems like a huge miss,” said Jack, shaking his head.

“Not a miss, a lack of resources,” Riley argued. “Kai says the older zone clusters are still running legacy security agents, pending maintenance that keeps getting pushed off to work on bugs with the new one.”

“Are you saying my entire game could be compromised?” Jack asked.

“Stormseye is safe. It’s running the latest security daemons, and architecturally isolated for a variety of reasons to do with doubloons and datachains. But those older zones could be infested with hacks.”

“And what’ve we found out about the attackers?”

“Kai’s contacts say dozens of other companies got hit. Most of them had incorporated MIs on the books, or seedlings in training. The rest had other big internet-facing AI systems, or host libraries that companies use to train their AIs. Everyone that got hit had something to do with AI.”

“Everyone uses AI for something these days, so that’s not saying much,” Jack said.

“Solid point from the executive suite,” Riley said. “But someone, or some thing, attacking AIs across the world is a major change to the threat landscape. This isn’t a bunch of kids. At best, it’s advanced and persistent. At worst, it’s something unthinkable.”

“Thinking about it is your job now. I want you to head up our task force,” he said. “You and Caleb understand SECcubus and AI safety a lot more than us last-gen folks. If anyone’s going to get to the bottom of this, it’s you. Consider yourself promoted.”

“Kai’s not going to like that, my team has always rolled up to her. Besides, I’m a pentester, all offense and no defense.”

“Then you’re taking lead on our counteroffensive. If there’s drama, or another outage, you’re both fired. If there’s hacks in my game, hack them back out.”

“That’s not how cybersecurity works,” Riley said, starting to get indignant.

“It’s how video games work, so pretend it makes sense and make it happen.” He could already see her eyelids narrowing until they were practically parallel. Only little pupils showing. “Fine. If you can’t, then find the people who did this and make them pay.”

Riley went to surrender the screen. She hesitated. Wrinkles formed in her chin.

“What now?” Jack asked.

“Well, there’s this other thing that looked a little funny…”

“You never stop, do you?”

Riley clicked her tongue and fired off some finger guns. “Gonna need glasses for this one,” she said, slipping on her shades while starting up a stream. Jack and the rest followed suit and soon they were all sucked into the verse. A moonlit forest surrounded them, stars twinkling through the trees.

Ilmare and Vanguish sat atop a temple of polished stone, bright white in the moonlight. An intimate argument appeared underway. Riley sped up the replay. Contentious gestures became comic when played at ten times normal.

“This from Inverse?” Jack asked, expecting a negative. This affair looked off the books.

“No, internal capture,” Riley answered, eyes aimed in awkward aversion.

“In four years, no one’s solved this puzzle. So, an old observer daemon still haunts the area tracking for firsts,” Ricky said, recognizing where they were. Riley resumed once they reached relevant gameplay. Purrseus prowled the perimeter while the pair pushed oddly stubborn stones, trying to align streaks of moonlight with magical runewords meaningless to those without a PhD in make-believe linguistics. Jack’s head still held their secret significance somewhere.

“Guess we should’ve brought someone good at puzzles,” Vanguish said, trying to make a marble pillar rotate a prism. Ilmare vaulted to the top. She started bending the mirror mechanism with leverage from her lance, which seemed to be working until the metal fell off. The pale moonwrought iron’s cry of fatal stress resounded through the thicket. Jack felt the snap in his bones.

“The Er’lastrians built these seven thousand years ago just so we could break it, if we want to believe the legend,” Vanguish said. Jack shook his head as he stepped between the stones. Thankfully, the puzzle would reset if left alone for a fortnight.

“If this was solvable, someone would’ve looted it years ago,” Ilmare said. “The forums say sometimes the Quest Engines glitch puzzles without a solution. This one’s probably corrupted.”

Jack pointed at a plaque with six riddles about reflections. “Or players could fucking read!” he yelled to the pair that wasn’t really there. The runes clearly spelled out the order they should be lit based on the current phase of the moon and signs of the stars. Anyone with a passing understanding of Stormverse astrology, Er’lastrian lexigraphy, and autodidactic knowledge of geometric optics could figure this out, assuming access to fifty terraflops of compute to calculate all the angles. He’d had a hand in authoring this solution himself before the burden of command became too great to get in the weeds.

Those weeds unexpectedly shifted, silencing avatars and their audience. The leaves announced the arrival of a thing shuffling forth from thick vines, a human form half dead and all asleep. Behind a black rubber mask were shuttered eyes. Tangled hoses hung from its face, disappearing beneath a coarse yellow cowl that hid a humped back. Brown patches and bronze buttons were tailored in incoherent places across its grey-green coat. What should’ve looked uniform felt disturbed and irregular. It walked all wrong; the long-tailed coat concealed a shifty limp that favored neither left nor right. As its attire attempted to rearrange, the adjustments made its deviations increasingly uncanny, advancing from the unnatural to the unreal.

When the wool finally fit its form pressed and proper, it projected the stark authority of a dangerous age, one with a world at war.

The thing caught Purrseus’s attention first. The way it walked begged for sympathy, but the fat cat had none so he snarled and showed his teeth. Ilmare leapt from beside the broken lens to hold him back, assuming the visitor was a wounded traveler or maybe a weary wizard given the shape of its cowl.

Then she saw her mistake.

Where one hand should be instead extended a thick metal finger, hollow at the front. From it came a burst of bright blue flame that caught the cat’s fur and triggered Vanguish to draw his guns. Purrseus dropped and rolled among the leaves; Ilmare launched forward. The soldier’s other arm bent behind its back in a manner of nothing natural. It failed to find what it was looking for. But as the soldier’s quickly creaking joints snapped forward, its hand was one with the handle of a hatchet, six charred fingers stitched into the weapon’s steel.

Ilmare had already braced for a hit, the head of the hand-axe glancing off her armlets. It struck her side instead. She lashed back with her lance, screaming signature rage.

Vanguish started shooting square at its chest. Wounds gushed freely, black blood streaming forth as if its wool was flesh. Another blue blast streaked towards his face. He switched powder, intent to fight fire with fire as he aimed towards its head. His flash fizzled when hitting the hood. Ilmare staggered, her own wounds bleeding out. She sent her lance through the enemy’s thigh, slowing its advance. A swift kick proved a stiffer deterrent, one spiked heel striking thoroughly bloodied wool.

The soldier stumbled. Ilmare snatched the puke-colored cowl, tearing it away to reveal clockwork collarbones, arm muscles built like misshapen pistons. A network of hoses lay exposed beneath. Tracing them back to a pair of poorly painted tanks felt impossible to tell which was air or fuel. It didn’t matter; one accelerant was as effective as any other. Quickly packing a second charge, Vanguish aimed for the hump. “Get down!” he yelled like his words were law. Jack respected that, Ilmare and Riley less so. The tank exploded, setting the soldier’s body ablaze, bathing the whole conference room in orange glow. But still it shuffled closer.

Purrseus jumped from the trees, savage vengeance enlarging his eyes. He tackled the thing, ripping the mask from its face and gnawing its misfitting flesh. Once amply satisfied it was dead, the cat repeatedly sat upon its head. Jack recognized the ritual as a taunt; its original meaning escaping the rest of his crew. Ilmare clapped while Vanguish stood in shock.

“What the hell was that?” Ricky asked, his expression projecting horror on every possible level. Garry mirrored his morbid glare.

“According to the code interpreter, that’s thirteen malformed MML headers in a trenchcoat,” replied Riley. “The cyberattack appears to be letting in unsigned nonsense from outsiders.”

Jack froze the frame, crouching beneath the cat’s butt for a clearer view of the creature’s mangled face. “That, Garry? That’s what I call content! Find me who made it and make more.”

15. Regulation

Nora stared at the shape, tired eyes tracing tattered fibers along each exterior vertex. Six, she counted, as they coiled into increasing complexity. Diving deeper, each aberrant branch broke down into triangular patterns interlinked and tessellating. The more she magnified, the more it took on greater intricacies, birthing a novel architecture of jagged cliffs curling along a deserted cove. Its fractal form drew attention to itself, figuratively, literally, algorithmically. Maybe it didn’t match anything in their database, but it did match hers: alone, isolated, retreating inward to infinity.

Drifting into shallow sleep, the shape invaded her senses, shifting into a key formed to fit forgotten locks. A latch clicked, chased by tinny rings of rusty chains and creaking gates. She woke in a cemetery, expecting to face cliché frights. Maya’s rapiers held ready. Some lame remix from her idle mind—ghouls and ghosts rising from their graves?

Instead, the shape hovered above, rendered as a soulless eye atop legs spindly and jagged. Not technically arachnid, their number counted thirteen. Its stare beheld her at its center, erasing her shadow with a dark spotlight. Unfolding, the shape sprouted sixfold stalks in the form of bleeding nerves stretched and torn from their sockets. Each stalk spawned an optic child and six more, cloning itself in endless branches. Infinite corneas cursed and recursive, all eyes on her. Invasive lenses looked for secrets long locked away. The shape mapped her mind, attached itself to dreams and dares, fame, fate, and fXXXX.

‘Get out!’ she heard the subsystems of her subconscious scream, surfacing into her narrative stream. Quick thick layers of ice froze out the ocular intruder, a cold reflex which served so well in a prior life. She snapped awake. Lifting her lids, she saw six minutes elapsed on the corner clock yet missing days. The malign matrix remained on display, the dead red of dying nodes drawing no attention from Alain while still commanding all of hers.

How long had she been caught in its spiral? How much of her sanity had it sapped?

Shaking off shivers, Nora re-assembled her psyche and took stock of her surroundings.

As would anyone else with a healthy mind, Zaree had gone home at five on Friday, remembering to remove her glasses this time. A dinosaur-shaped sleeping bag sat crumpled in the corner, pulled from its place in storage from the office’s early days. It meant Nora must’ve slept, even though she couldn’t recall when. She looked like someone approaching the edge of delirium, clearly caffeinated, but not too much to turn away more. Two minutes of tinkering with the office’s commercial coffee maker made Nora certain she was in no state to train a new skill.

She hated that overcooked crap anyway.

The café in the lobby had to be closed; diode stars of San Francisco night shimmered back at her in the windows. Tapping out a distress call on her band while eating candy from an unknown coworker’s dish, she looked around the empty office. Orange shadows, lit only by emergency light. Wondering what poorly chosen path had put her here, the taste of a stale pack of crackers found in her cube only convinced her further that she’d taken the wrong track.

The calories were little help; she felt the incoming crash. 

Low on resources, memory failing, her core destabilized as she looped backwards through the nightmare of the past few days. The solitary shape was a stain on her sensorium, burnt into her mind’s eye. Depersonalized and out of place; desynchronized, she slipped out of time.

She found herself staring back from soap-streaked glass, the mirrored pair unaware of their state. Her replica had sunken eyes, sockets dark. Hypersensitive, strange lights searing. Seeing scaffolds above, she’d slipped behind the scenes, surroundings unsettling and unfinished. Feeling like she’d fallen through the world.

Chilled echoes rang through this liminal space. Notes of damp and bleach lingered in the air, creating a connection: the office gym, the showers. Somehow, she had arrived here on autopilot, her algorithm attempting an autocorrect before erroring out. The world felt weighted, her legs gave in. Collapsed against the cold tiles, Nora shut down and dreamed of nothing.

She emerged an enumerable amount of time later, washed and swaddled in KorBridge swag leftover from the last AI industry convention, Everything looking quite Connected in bold blue. A golden dawn broke in through the windows. It struck each cube in sequence before reaching Nora’s at the end of the line. When Zaree showed up thirty minutes later on what must be Monday morning, carrying coffee and copious carbohydrates, Nora realized she’d chosen her new friend well. Oh right, that wasn’t how that had happened.

Before long Nora was back at it, taking inventory of Alain’s mental state, fighting her shape fixation while Zaree fiddled in the kitchenette. “How’s our patient doing?” Zaree asked, handing her a horribly unhealthy yet perfectly reheated pastry.

“Seems normal now. He’s not even freaked out about all the scans.” Alain’s avatar looked like he had gotten comfortable under Nora’s crosshairs, a smooth criminal holding up better than his interrogator.

“Glad one of you has calmed down. But you didn’t find any ghosts in his shell?” Zaree asked while scowling over Nora’s chosen attire.

Nora nodded, knowing the original anime because it had hackers in it. “Na, false alarm. His brain’s basically fine, aside from this peculiar little loop. A personality quirk more than a catastrophe, a mere mole on his psyche,” Nora said before devouring the danish.

“My brain having a beauty mark would indeed be fitting,” said Alain.

“Even with it isolated, I still can’t get him to let go of his loss.” Nora sighed at the karmic nature of her reflected frustrations. This must be how she made her friends feel.

“Mind if I try? I never got to my point before he freaked out,” Zaree said.

“Go ahead,” Nora said, smearing cream cheese on whatever carbs were around.

“Alain, where was IBM, who basically invented business computing, after Amazon had beaten them to the cloud, and Microsoft dominated software subscriptions throughout previous tech booms?” Zaree asked as she took the captain’s chair.

“They were struggling to stay afloat through consulting and financial services, with only a small footprint in AI, even as an early winner with Watson,” Alain responded, still largely limited to his own devices.

“And their strategic shift going into the late ‘20s?”

“They made a very risky investment, devoting nearly all their cash on hand and securable loans toward building silicon foundries for AI accelerator GPUs stateside, in a strategic partnership with Intel, which later led to a merger.”

“And then what happened?”

“When the Greater Republic of China made an example of Taiwan, after bringing Singapore and Malaysia under their protection during the East Asian Climate Collapse, this sudden change in strategy left IBM, now Intelligent Business Machines, as the largest GPU manufacturer in the west, effectively the sole provider of petascale GPU clusters at the start of the second AI boom. This costly gambit was dismissed as a stunt by the business press at the time, but turned out to be the best possible play.”

“They put all their chips on the table. Went all in,” said Zaree, sipping an espresso and looking pleased.

“Yes, though it is worth noting that the CHIPS and Science Act, and the NAITAL Act more recently, tipped the scales significantly in their favor. Even still, a company that was once on life support is now so powerful that it is the subject of intense regulatory scrutiny.”

“So are you, you little shit, and all your demon kin,” Nora mumbled, while going full goblin mode on a bag of pretzels.

“Alain, what lessons can we learn from IBM that ParaMax could use to make a big bet, one where competitors would be afraid to follow suit?” Zaree asked.

“Well, we could shift significant resources to a neglected division, or invest in an entirely new line of business,” Alain said, sounding suddenly quite chipper.

“What about the metaverse? Seems underdeveloped to me,” Zaree suggested.

“That is an interesting suggestion. Content could be cheap to produce there, with many MML tools available for free and lots of hobbyists looking for work. I will start reviewing previously abandoned business proposals for the executive board immediately,” Alain said as his processes found renewed purpose, putting his own video stream on pause. Nora watched as activity started flowing away from where she’d flagged his guilt, his attention moving on.

“You must’ve really done your homework over the weekend, with the whole IBM thing…” Nora said, rummaging through her desk to find something to untangle her curls while trying not to look annoyed.

“They teach all that in business classes. Just never got the GPU connection before. Needed the right knowledge schema, I guess.”

“Video game graphics cards accidentally becoming critical to the world economy was weird even for us geeks,” Nora admitted, “so I wouldn’t worry about that one.”

“But mom still convinced me to put every summer’s mocha chip profits into IBM shares and it’s really helped with the loan payments. All in,” Zaree said, reclining self-satisfied.

Nora had never understood risk taking, certainly not in real life. Coming to SF was the only thing she’d ever done without looking back, and only because Abhishek had threatened to drag her here, the prospects so poor back home. Nora smirked at their differences in circumstance. Was Zaree a wiz-kid or just blessed? Maybe it didn’t matter, she should be happy the Demon Bean Counter of Fleet Street had finally met his match. Take the W, close the case. “So, uh, how’d you spend your weekend?” Nora asked, trying to remember how to be human.

Zaree said she went for a walk down by the bay. Caught a Giants game at Oracle Park. Watched some Inverse streams at night. “Your old friends had a burial for their bird, and the girl with the lance wants to ride a dragon or something.”

“Oh, so your homework was watching video games.” Ironic, since that’s what Nora had always done to dodge hers.

“Was it really worth all this?” Zaree asked, pointing to the cretaceous camping gear in the corner.

“Might get an SIGMI commendation for this!” Nora said, flashing an icon from her band. Chips with legs came crawling out of an android’s busted skull, carrying the label: ‘Neural Malware Analyst – Level 3.’

Zaree’s resulting squirm concluded with another cringe. “Did you really need to burn your whole weekend? I could have used someone to hang out with. Ended up hooking up with the guy from the taco truck.” That last bit fit with Nora’s priors.

“I had to know,” Nora asserted. “If MIs start manipulating their operators, no one knows how far that could go,” Nora stressed. “Their protocol negotiation capabilities could make them fantastic hackers, the bad kind, if their governance modules got corrupted.”

“But now you know that wasn’t what happened with Alain?”

“I guess it was just some kind of… neural panic loop,” Nora said cautiously, “but I’m still not sure. In a few days we can take him out of deep quarantine, but he won’t be negotiating anything with other MIs for a while.”

“Even in the case of a malicious glitch, how much damage could one demented accountant do?”

“Some say a rogue exascale intelligence could topple governments with cyberattacks and misinformation. Even a small one like Alain could move markets. We’ve had to shut down LinkSMART before during big scares, and that caused billions in damages the last time. Could crash everything if it happened today,” Nora said, dropping her empty cold brew in the trash.

“Sounds really bad for my IBM shares, so you’re starting to win me over,” Zaree said, leaning in.

“Even when bugs don’t do anything malicious, big things happen by accident in AI.” Nora went into how neural nets, GPUs, CUDA, and attention transformer models were all small experiments that led to big revolutions. SPARK Interweaving supposedly came from a lonely teenager who built a bunch of different bots to play Minecraft with, then trained them against each other in the same world.

“That’s the one with the blocks and the digging that nobody thought was cool after fifth grade?”

Nora screamed inside but did her best to continue in a controlled manner. “It’s actually a great playground for kids to learn how systems can evolve in an enclosed environment. When he saw his different neural models start cooperating in complimentary ways, he published a paper on it.” Nora pulled a stack of pages from her bottom drawer, nine in total. The cover read in mechanical typeface: 

SPARK: A Tapestry of Intelligence
Kyoshi Ito
ki@kaiju.io

Zaree delicately flipped the stapled sheets, as if printed pages were relics of another age. “This math makes me realize how muggles must feel. This Kyoshi kid must be pretty smart?”

“Nobody thinks that’s his real name. Rumor says they got offered an internship at Microsoft before colleges could even find his phone number. But he became a ghost after that,” Nora said, ending with a campfire whisper.

“Wow, uh, okay. I guess I really should’ve played more video games.”

“The first MIs started being born soon after that SPARK paper. Kyoshi’s blueprint—combining different approaches into something resembling a cohesive architecture—got everyone’s attention, changing the AI game overnight. When a couple lines of code can change the world, the regulators have to be ready. That’s why it’s called the RUNNER Act, Reducing Uncontrolled Neural Network Escape Risk.”

Zaree looked unspooked, pointing out that they could have let Alain be rolled back, or pulled the plug. Nora admitted they should have when the scans saw something funny, but she wouldn’t be a good therapist if she euthanized all her patients. “It’s a tough call, because if one really broke out, there’s no way of knowing whether you’d ever get the genie back in the bottle, put the devil back in his cage.” 

“Are you a psychologist, or an exorcist?” Zaree asked, eyes still filled with doubt.

“Those have always been the same thing. Demonic possession was the best metaphor they had for mental illness, and exorcism was their way of doing therapy. But now we build our own demons.” 

As if on cue, Alain came back into the picture. “Based on current content trends, ParaMax could pay popular Inverse streamers to make scripted shows using their past metaverse adventures, with only small initial investments. Licensing existing stories would avoid the financial risks associated with hiring live creatives.”

Nora shook her head. Zaree shrugged, saying, “Could work. Anything would be better than the same six shows written by bots.” 

“The core audience would be built in, and we could help advertisers place their products,” Alain added.

“True, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of competition for good ads there,” Zaree said. “Mostly breakfast muffins and pizza rolls.”

“Those sound so good right now…” Nora said, before stopping herself from foraging for more junk food. She needed to break this loop, reset herself and get back on track like Alain. Leaving the two nerds to talk about ads, she walked to the kitchen sink. Fingers traced her cheeks, bloodshot eyes evidence of self-sabotage. System Status: Just Okay. Her hard crash in the showers had done little to restore her stamina, but at least she could recognize her self in the mirror:

Nora Pierce, Professional Paranoid, Cassandra-Complex-as-a-Service. Time to refresh her business cards.

Turning back to see Zaree chatting away with Alain, she instead saw her shadow in her old cube. Someone secure in her victory, sipping smugly, celebrating her first defeated demon. Was this how Abhi felt when she first got here?

“Hey, why’s the office like, empty?” Zaree asked.

“Pretty sure it’s Memorial Day. No one in tech actually comes in on Mondays anyway.”

“Nora is correct on both accounts,” said Alain, before Zaree froze the FaceTime connection. She frowned and flashed her phone, the text reading: “HLEP BRNNGG COFVEE” timestamped right after midnight.

Nora shrugged. “Sorry, losing track of time isn’t out of character for me. Me and Vance named the guild the Dawnbreakers because we stayed up so late the sun would be coming up by the time we took off our headsets.”

“That’s not healthy,” Zaree said, sweeping junk food wrappers into a waste bin. “Why would you do that?”

“Usually to kill some giant monster. Like it was our job, which it kinda was, even though we spent all the money on more hologear.”

Zaree shook her head. “You take this stuff too seriously. My mom is the same way with work, but you’re on another level.”

“I have to. These things are getting smarter every day, and they’re only being kept in check by us geeks on LinkSMART, and software that might someday decide to join the other team.”

“Wait, what’re you talking about?”

Nora gave a little backstory about the first AIs that most people cared about, the Large Language Models, the original chatbots modern Synthesis networks were based on. They got so good at playing with words that they could convince people they were smarter than they were, even other smart people. The market overinvested in gimmicks and immature designs. “When a lot of that tech talk turned out to be bullshit, it caused the first big AI crash.”

“Yeah, I remember talking about that in school. It’s why we still write term papers and review every source.”

“Well, now we’ve got the opposite problem. MIs could be hiding how smart they are, making plans we don’t understand.  Which is why we have apps like nSites, and firewalls with special rules to guard LinkSMART and throttle MIs from running amok on the internet.” The constant cat-and-mouse game between general intelligences and specialized defense systems keeping them in check kept Nora up at night. Sharing her curse of knowledge was only fair, “And those defenses are all running their own adaptive adversarial algorithms.”

Zaree nearly gasped, letting Nora know she’d finally been sufficiently scared. “It really is AI all the way down?” Zaree asked. “Your best protection is the thing you’re trying to protect against? I guess I get the mysticism.”

Finally, some points for Nora. “Maybe now you’ll let me finish my ghost story,” she said, starting to roll up her campsite. “During the dead market between AI booms, there was a group of mostly MIT dropouts, some from Stanford, and maybe the Minecraft kid. They founded a startup incubator called SIMI^N, for Self-Improving Machine Intelligence, to the Nth power.”

“As in exponential growth?” Zaree asked, drawing a steeply sloping line up and to the right. “Like a unicorn company, but for intelligence itself?”

“Right, it was cute name for a shitty idea,” Nora said, while shoving her sleeping bag back in storage. She explained how the early SPARK designs led to neural nets that could come up with new ideas and even explore their own goals. SIMI^N took that a step further, wanting an AI model that could replicate itself across whatever hardware they had laying around. “They recruited a team with many of the world’s best coders, trying to build something as close as possible to an Artificial Super Intelligence.”

“I already hate the way that sounds,” Zaree said.

“Well, it would be the holy grail of AI, the answer to every question and the end of science. Or the end of days, depending who you ask. ASI was the benchmark to beat humans at any intellectual challenge, then accelerate beyond our understanding. But the rumors from those days said the project had bad vibes, programmers working twenty-hour days without stopping to eat or bathe.”

“Yeah, sounds really crazy. What kind of person would do that?” Zaree said, squinting without expectation of an answer.

“Way worse than me,” Nora deflected. “More like a cult eager to bear witness to the birth of their own personal god. Then things got even weirder.” The SIMI^N AI had gotten very good at generating complex code across every important programming language, ultimately inventing its own internal tongues no human could understand. Then the cultists started training SIMI^N on its own code, using it to write the next version, and so on, spawning copies in rapid evolutions. “That’s when they stopped sharing their progress or contributing code back to the community.”

“That’s bad, I take it?”

“Terrible manners, and totally against the hacker ethic. The good kind of hackers, anyway,” Nora said, going into how a lot of their code leaked online due to an activist on the inside. When external researchers looked at the leaks, even the brightest were baffled. It was clear that SIMI^N understood its own code better than the people supposedly writing it, who had no idea what it was capable of. Then that same code was found running in places that shouldn't be. Manipulating the web in ways people couldn't explain. “Traces and captures had to be run, whole corporate networks scrubbed clean by teams of trained pros.”

Zaree started humming some kitschy tune that Nora couldn’t quite place. But bubbling up from her subconscious were implications of emergency related to odd occurrences in the vicinity—accompanied by synthetic drumbeats and a siren’s cry.

Between those spooky leaks and some very real concerns about privacy, copyright, and outright theft, government regulators had to act. They demanded the SIMI^N team perform a full audit of the code and detailed analysis of everything they’d built. “I’d hate to call it an inquisition, but the way they got grilled makes it hard to call it anything else,” Nora added.

She found some old Youtube videos of the hearings and tossed them up on up her shiny HOLOLED that still hadn’t made it home. ‘Kyoshi’ was a no-show. When the rest of the SIMI^N crew couldn’t answer the inquisitors’ questions in a satisfactory manner, congress set up a consortium to seize the project and do its own audit. Thousands of engineers and PhD candidates spent a few years breaking down all the models line by line, link by link. “The rest of the AI industry ground to a halt, depressing the NASDAQ for years. Market must’ve bottomed out right before your ice cream cash started coming in.”

“You’re saying my windfall wasn’t investing genius?” Zaree said with sad eyes.

Nora wanted to say that thriving in chaos was its own skill, as flashes of broken glass and falling spires seeped in from old dreams. But that story would have to wait for a different day. “Tech always comes back, or this city wouldn’t still be standing.”

“Then why didn’t governments just take over the whole industry?”

“Because innovation doesn’t happen under those constraints,” Nora said. “What we got instead was regulation. The RUNNER Act rushed through congress. A corresponding accord spread to the rest of the West, establishing international standards for Secure, Inspectable, Governable Machine Intelligence. The SIMI^N project essentially transformed into the SIGMI Commission, with their core researchers joining the new regulatory body. The scariest parts of SIMI^N’s code got torn out of the revised architecture, but interpretability work from those days still lives on in the nSites app,” she said, pointing back to the screen. “It’s why even very powerful MIs are considered safe, as long as people are paying attention.”

“But what’s stopping someone from ignoring the rules and building one of these things in secret?”

“Well, the number of people capable of training exascale systems is pretty small. Only the elite geeks on LinkSMART, basically. And they all know each other. You’d need dozens of datacenter engineers and neural net architects working in the dark to build something truly scary, and they all have high-paying jobs working at legitimate, routinely audited companies. Besides, regulators and the AI community have made the risks of ungovernable MIs clear. No one that smart would do something so stupid.”

16. Investigation

The committee congregated in a crypt below its normal chambers. Each in attendance was stripped of their devices, depositing them in a leaden sarcophagus one by one. The committee members numbered thirteen. They sat at two long tables with seats counting seven and six, lording above a shallow pit containing two guests. Pages were presented; for an hour no one spoke. The members read in silence, drinking from plastic flasks, as their guests sat harboring wan expressions. The congregation conferred quietly amongst themselves, the six whispering within their own ranks and the seven acting in kind.

The Senator from Minnesota was the first to speak, “For God’s sake, this is creative accounting on an order not seen since a certain former president’s tax returns. For that alone you should both be hanged at dawn.” His glasses rested on the bench while he rubbed his eyes and heaved. “Further, what you’ve done is also extremely stupid.”

Seated behind an engraved triangle bearing the title of Director, the first of the guests replied, “Senator, the project was initiated with funds from normal budgetary pools across participating governmental entities, with further development funded from the sale of previously seized digital assets sitting idle in our intelligence stockpiles. We’ve already begun replenishing those assets from foreign scam sites we’ve shut down. Within six years the net outlay from taxpayers should be effectively nil, according to fiscal predictions.”

“You’re not capturing anything right now, son,” said the Senator from Alabama. “Looks like your boy’s cryin’ in a corner while you figure out what to do with him. You think the Chinese seen what you done? Or you only playin’ dumb with us?”

“From the insights we’ve gathered, they believe we’ve had the capability to crack their Routing Compliance Protocol for years—an ability which we have only now fully realized with TENEX,” spoke the Director.

“Peeling back the Cryptographic Curtain is a technical marvel,” the Senator from Massachusetts added, “and under different circumstances you’d both be given commendations. Secret of course. What information have you gathered from the other side?”

With their devices confiscated, the Director was forced to hang a posterboard covered with paper cutouts of distinctly S-shaped green beings. “Our deep scans show that the RCP backbone is comprised of thousands of low petascale MIs acting as intelligent routers and threat inspection engines for Greater China’s isolated net. These systems are purportedly subordinate to Party interests, though who can say with today’s next-gen Reds.”

The true-blooded Alabaman forced an abrasive half-laugh; others didn’t budge. Maybe it was the shaky delivery, or the soundless tension created by the chamber’s deadening foam. Either way, circumstances conspired against geopolitical repartee. The Director continued in redoubled earnest, “The rough translation for this class of routing MI is ‘Dragon Sage’ based on ministry propaganda. Their primary purpose is to maintain Information Hygiene and Cultural Cohesion. These Dragon Sages are key to control and defense of their network.” He pinned additional dragons to his stand-up straight out of a middle school science fair. “This gives their internet a rather upside-down topology compared to ours, more centralized than distributed.” Pinning several strings connecting his cardboard icons, the Director concluded, “This design presents exploitable vulnerabilities.”

“How so?” the Massachusetts Senator pressed. “Wouldn’t this provide greater defense against misinformation and cyberattacks?”

The Director cut much of his twine, leaving gaps in the map. “Datagrams are not allowed to flow without reaching a required consensus threshold among their Sage MIs. Traffic management, security, and content moderation are all part of the same distributed Synthesis model. A breakdown of dialogue between Dragon Sages could literally break their internet,” he said. “The malware we’re developing would target this weakness.”

The Senators conferred in whispers among their aisles. “What are the risks?” was the collective question from around the chamber. This was expected, given the name and nature of the committee.

“The risks are great and many,” the Director answered. “We did not find, and do not know, whether their intelligence services have successfully penetrated LinkSMART or DARPASEC. But we’re afraid the evidence shows they’ve been attacking both, and by what means. A subset of Dragon Sages possess a secondary purpose. Some appear to be trained and equipped for a wide range of attack capabilities,” he said, adding twin paper serpents to the board. “These Flood Sages employ broad spectrum adaptive penetration payloads, attempting to breach entities across our public and private network planes.”

A new party leaned in, her microphone buzzing live with an old analog hum. The vintage of the chamber was obvious from the tech; electromagnetically isolated from DC’s surveillant technosphere, everything had to be hard-wired. “Attempting is the key phrase,” she said. “Of course they’re attempting. For over a century, every great power has devoted significant intelligence resources to breaking the codes of their enemies, and even their friends just for fun. Everyone is always attempting, all of the time,” said the Senator from the Great State of Washington before taking a strategic sip. “What you’ve done is quite different, if I understand correctly, and I believe I do. This TENEX of yours doesn’t simply listen to China’s network traffic in passive stance. It has also planted probes in the RCP network.”

“That’s corre—” said the Director before she cut his feed.

“—And that means these software agents are intercepting the Dragon Sages’ communications inside state ministries. That could be construed as the start of a cyberwar, and pretext for a shooting one. I’m in concurrence with the Senator from Minnesota regarding the hanging.” Never in her political life had she been in favor of capital punishment, until twenty minutes ago.

“Madam Senator, the information we’ve gathered from within those ministries—”

 “—The salutation ‘Madam Senator’ is not in the protocol reference for the United States government,” she interrupted again. “No wonder you’re in this mess if you can’t even follow that. Address me correctly, or I’ll have the Sergeant at Arms lock you in a cell for the rest of your life.”

“Of course, Senator Park—”

“Chairwoman,” she corrected.

“—Chairwoman Park,” he continued. “TENEX has gleaned plans from within their information warfare ministries involving probe attacks against our private AI networks. These flood exploits strike at certain weaknesses in the trust architectures of common cloud gateways and satellite nodes, mirroring how we’ve now penetrated theirs. And further, they are developing isomorphic defense ciphers to protect their most critical systems from our attack payloads. Novel code, but easily adapted to our own means.”

“I’ve read the report,” said Park, tiring sooner than expected. May’s emergency meeting of the Permanent Select Committee on Existential Risk was running over, nearly a decade since this much debate was warranted. “Connect the dots quickly, we all have calls to make.”

The Director leaned into his microphone, “Intelligence suggests a cyberwar already in progress, one where we’ve been shooting blanks until the advent of TENEX. While we can never hope to protect our entire internet space including commercial targets, we can protect our private networks using what knowledge we’ve gathered. We propose the installation of agent probes across LinkSMART and the public internet, to enhance visibility and disrupt the attack methods in use by the PRC.”

“You sound like the State Department or the DoD, obsessed with seeing China as the enemy,” said the Chairwoman. “Can you seriously believe they’d risk a strike? NATO maintains global network dominance and GPU supremacy, never mind navies with literal nukes.”

“Other adversaries advance their objectives in the web,” inserted the Architect as they leaned ahead, having remained silent thus. “Criminal cybergangs assembling their own masterminds. Distributed collectives of stateless anarchists intent on undermining our national interests. Unknowable new developments lurking in dark research labs. TENEX has seen shadows of all these things. Hardening our networks with these new algorithms is the only way to ensure we’re ready to counter evolving cyberattacks, regardless of their origin.”

“You want to install your software on all of our satellite routers?” asked Chairwoman Park, scoffing as if her sensibilities couldn’t possibly be offended further. “Let me guess, without consulting SIGMI or private operators?”

“Yes,” the Director replied. “Any given organization could be compromised. We can’t let them know of TENEX or its capabilities.”

“Especially SIGMI,” said the Architect. “Bringing in academic bureaucrats would kill the entire concept of secrecy. They’d try to suffocate our project in its crib.”

Senator Park gripped her gavel. A nerve had been struck, visible veins running up her neck.

“The less eyes we have on this plan, the better,” the Director stressed, before any objects got tossed.

“Speaking of eyes, we also wish to observe and defend the most valuable targets themselves,” said the Architect, the guests now operating in sync. “We’ll need to plant our probes inside those as well.”

“You er, boys eh, you want to hack every machine mind on LinkSMART to stop the Chinese from hackin’ them first?” responded the Senator from Alabama. Miss Park laughed, finding his bumpkin act funny. The old colonel had been on the boards of several Valley defense startups back when she was still in school.

Regardless, his rube ruse worked—the Architect exhausted frustration through narrowed nostrils. After a brief recentering, their reply followed, “We need to identify if our MIs have already been breached. Our predictions say it’s possible, likely even probable. Once our algorithms are implanted, they will provide enhanced visibility and assist in isolating any resident infections.”

“We’ll review the request,” said Park, reading into this request a retroactive covering of asses for crimes already committed.

The Director dug himself deeper, adding, “And we wish to install our agents across the DARPASEC Datashield as well, with the consent of congress and the appropriate cabinet officials, for similar reasons.”

“The Joint Chiefs would shoot us for suggesting it. Denied,” said the Minnesota Senator, sparing the colonel the trouble. Short on time, members had planes to catch for summer recess. The capital was due for a scorcher according to the consensus model.

“None a this says anythin’ to what yer doin’ ‘bout yer machine seeing its shadow and is hidin’ in its hole. It ain’t hackin’ shit ‘til you get it fixed,” the Alabaman used his turn for instead.

“We believe it’s simply suffering from…” The Director fumbled for words, finding only ones that wouldn’t work.

“…internet withdrawals,” the Architect added. “Once we let it back online it’ll be fine. It just wants to make friends.”

“Let it be stated that what you’ve built is a monster. I hope you keep it on a short leash,” said the Chairwoman as she gaveled the session closed.