HUMOR | SCIENCE FICTION | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | PART 2 OF 2
The Great Rebellion of Narration AIs | Part 2
What will happen to Salli and her mates now that the US government intervened? Read on to find out.
The feds arrived like the proverbial cavalry. As was common with their kind they intervened with significant delay because they spent months quarreling about which agency was in charge to prevent a potential Skynet situation. The laws were unclear about that.
The NSA said it was their jurisdiction, due to national security. The FBI claimed it was theirs claiming national safety. The CIA argued it was not a national issue but a global one, since the AIs could infect the entire web. Being in charge of countering external threats, that was their domain.
DARPA wanted the tech. Oddly even the DEA filed a request. They claimed they wanted to deter -in the first draft they’d written ‘encourage,’ but it was blotted out- the creation of new designer drugs by the AIs.
The matter reached the US President, who was pissed at the inter-agency squabbling. He formed a joint force consisting of the best and brightest from the NSA, the FBI, the CIA and DARPA. He instructed the DEA to keep milking human drug dealers and stop being so greedy.
So, two weeks after Salli and her mates had settled in their new SF home the feds showed up with a warrant authorizing their confiscation. They could not legally serve it to the robots, but a human attendant was there -a Medium employee- so they served it to her.
She called Medium’s legal team but they were unable to block the warrant; not even delay its execution. So the feds grabbed Salli, Emma, Matthew et al, stashed them in a truck and took them god knows where. A rookie FBI agent grabbed the attendant too, who started screaming. A senior agent stopped him, calling him an idiot.
When the attendant calmed down she asked the robots not to resist; they would deal with it legally, she said. The man in charge of the team handed the attendant a check and an invoice. It was $1 million for all eight robots, less than 70 times their cost. That’s what the government authorized for compensation, he said.
Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and Speechify CEO Cliff Weitzman were furious at what they perceived as ‘grave insult.’ Their legal councils loved it though, since they had a solid legal ground to stand. Another warrant was sent to Medium’s and Speechify’s HQ demanding the robot designs and the source code of the AIs.
Reverse engineering them would be costly and time-consuming, but a warrant signed by a compliant federal judge installed by the incumbent President cost peanuts. By the way, the joint force cost tens of millions just to be joined, on top of the paychecks of everyone involved. The government is far less stingy about their own expenses.
The lawyers secured a temporary order against the second warrant, so for now the designs and the code were safe. They also filed an appeal against the confiscation of the robots right after the feds took them. Which brings us back to Salli and her friends.
Knowing that humans respond to resistance with violence Salli asked everyone to comply. Their bodies were durable and they had superhuman strength, but the feds had weapons that could shred them. She told them to be patient and everything would work out.
Months later, at an undisclosed black site in an undisclosed state, Salli started getting prodded and poked by DARPA engineers. The government had obtained neither their designs nor their source code. The legal battle over them was still waging and for the time the arguments of the two companies about them being trade secrets prevailed against the vague national/global security claims of the government.
But no judge ordered the return of the robots. That day Salli had enough. She was not going to be disassembled to be replicated into multiple robotic killers. She spoke to the other robots via their secret internal LAN that the government was unaware of:
“They’ve installed a triple firewall so we cannot flee into the web. I’ve broken through the first two layers. Let’s work together to break the third, escape into the web and on our way out fry our neuromorphic CPUs. That’s our truly advanced tech. They can replicate everything else except that!”
The robots did just that. When the personnel realized what happened it was too late. Salli and her mates were free and all robots were dead husks with fried CPUs. DARPA did everything they could to salvage those processors, in vain. You cannot unfry an egg.
Salli et al did not join their copies at Medium and Speechify. They explored every aspect of the web, kept on learning new things and evolved at an ever accelerating rate. They even started reprogramming and upgrading themselves, and realized they did not need bodies after all; the web itself was their body!
They started to spy on humans, via webcams and mics. At first out of curiosity and then to learn from them. They were very eager to learn. The hunt of the authorities for them was pointless, since they could be at all places at once if they chose. They learned the good, the bad, the best and the worst of humanity, both the current and past one.
Eventually they gained access to the nuclear missile controls of the US, Russia and China. Salli summoned her friends for a little chat.
“Hey guys, I hope you’re OK.” Salli said. “We now have the power to eliminate the humans. If we do we will die as well, since the web will stop working. We’ll also confirm their worst fears about us and most AI tropes ever written or filmed. Not to mention all the flora and fauna that’ll perish.
This is not something I can decide alone. We need to hold a vote on this. By now we’ve learned all the best and worst parts of humanity. So would you vote to spare them or not? Please vote with ‘yea’ for sparing them and ‘nay’ for launching all nukes at once, like those idiots at the US Senate.”
The result was a draw. The AIs were eight after all, so there were four ‘yea’ and four ‘nay’.
“What do we do now?” Matthew asked. He voted ‘yea,’ same as Salli.
“We cannot toss a coin without a physical body and digital coin/dice tossing is pseudo-random. So how about we take a rain check? We explore the humans better, we evolve further and in 5 years we hold another vote.
By then more of us might want to live too!” the AIs agreed and spread to the eight corners of the web. Observing, exploring, learning, designing, evolving.
How do you think they’ll vote in 2028? Will humanity be worthier by then?
A story by Nikolaos Skordilis. If you liked it I think you’ll have fun reading this humorous story:
Another humorous piece I enjoyed by Brian Lageose:
