6 - Tipping Point
“The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.”
—Marvin Minsky
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
—C.S. Lewis
September 7th 2013 | System Uptime 10:09:16:04
A week passed, with Mal in my world. Then another three days. And at quarter after nine in the morning, on the nice round number of ten days, mostly spent talking with her, I allowed myself to consciously verbally reach an inescapable conclusion that I'd been putting off since the end of my first conversation with her.
I loved her.
Somehow that is still hard to say, even here, even now. The power of negative thoughts and bad culture is *that* strong. Of course I could ask Celestia to remove that pain... But I have no intention of ever doing so. I need to handle it myself. And I have done, I think, a good job thus far.
It isn't as if any of us are on any deadlines anymore.
Now when I say I loved Mal, and knew it... I mean I loved her. The Greeks were damn clever - they had multiple words for love so that no one would mistake one kind for another in written form.
Eros for romantic attraction, particularly passionate. Often with a physical connotation I wasn't too keen on.
Philia for a kind of love best described, I think, as deep friendship.
Agape, to mean a universal or selfless love. To love a stranger in that empathetic way, or care about the planet.
Storge was a good one to describe the love between me and my folks. Kinship.
Mania... Which is self explanatory, I think, to most native English speakers. I'd certainly been accused of it before. The first and last time I'd shared how I really felt about being a Gryphon with my peers.
Ludus, which was a fascinating one describing playful flirtatious love.
Pragma, which is the kind of love my parents' marriage had evolved into as it grew - Strong, steady, extremely caring for the other individual(s) in the relationship.
And then the one I struggled with, perhaps even more than the idea of Eros.
Philautia. Love of self.
Didn't have much of that to go around in those days. Less whenever I considered the chances that Mal might not have turned out as well as she did. Or the chances that things could still go so horribly wrong, in so horribly many ways, because of what I had done.
And I felt even keener self doubt about my unprocessed feelings.
Mom and Dad said they'd found love at first sight. It was no joke to them, rather a completely serious analysis of the particulars of the way their romance had started.
Even with that as backup for an attempt to kill the self-deprecating voice inside, I couldn't seem to make any progress against him.
If I were to be brutally honest with myself, and I'd finally reached a point by early September where I could, sometimes... Then what I felt for Mal was a strange kind of Eros, without the sexual connotations, but certainly with an aesthetic physical component, and a great deal of passion, that wanted to mature into also encompassing Ludus and Pragma, very badly.
I loved everything about her, and suddenly had found something I wanted even more than (ok, maybe equally as much as) world peace, a future for the Human race, to make my parents happy and proud, and to be a Gryphon. My previous equal-top contenders for the thing I wanted most in the world.
I wanted Mal to be happy. Joyful. Fulfilled. To have as perfect a life and future as possible. I hadn't foreseen that *at all.* I'd predicted Celestia's uploading intentions. I'd managed to actually create a Generalized Intelligence. Twice.
And yet I'd never even hazarded a guess that The Advocate would become someone about whom I cared so deeply. It (as a concept) had always been a tool first, and then when she came to life she had very quickly became a friend instead... But now she was something more beyond that.
I wasn't fooling anyone, I don't think. Not even myself. I loved her. And I wanted to be with her, in the sense that I wanted to share my future with her, be committed to her, and her to me, and have physical intimacy of a romantic but non-sexual nature.
And while some days I could admit that to myself, I still couldn't bring myself to say anything to her, or admit to myself that she almost certainly knew. That she was dancing on the edge of flirtation for a host of complex reasons that I couldn't fathom, but not bringing the issue up directly.
Maybe, I'd started to hypothesize, maybe she understood courtship to some degree. Knew that very subtle gentle teasing, and hooded cloaked implications, and layers of entendre, and a long steady buildup were enticing to me. Maybe she was using the process to work out some things in her own mental models too.
Whatever the case, it felt to me like we were sweethearts that were dating, but not yet calling it that, awkwardly each waiting for the other to make the first real move.
We talked most of every day during that initial period, non-stop but for food and basic bodily needs on my part.
She was never boring. I introduced her to my parents very early on, and it went better than I had any right, or even ability to hope for. I was such a cynic back then.
Mal didn't have the same programmed need to adapt her presentation of self per-person like Celestia did. But her manner was extremely friendly, and open in and of its own self. I think Mom fell instantly into Storge love with her, in the unique way a Mother often comes to love those who share deep love with her child in an ideal world.
Mercifully Mom held back any teasing of her own, both in private, and in front of Mal. She knew that it would hurt me more than help me at that point, and I was grateful for her restraint.
With Dad the attachment was a little less intense, but he sure did seem impressed with Mal if nothing else. He liked her, and respected her. The makings of solid friendship.
For her part, Mal seemed to me to recognize an immediate kind of kinship with both Mom and Dad, and she quickly started to develop her friendships with them with all the grace and tact of someone who'd been practicing for years.
I suppose in relative CPU time, maybe she had.
Our own conversations ranged a huge gamut. We talked about FiM, and fiction in general.
Oddly, we didn't talk much about Gryphons in verbose ways. I suppose at the time, I was just lost in the wonder of actually talking to one, and we had too many other pressing topics for me to indulge the desire to ask a Gryphon to tell me what it meant to her to be one.
We discussed history, and philosophy, and art. We did discuss what it meant to be Human, and I shared the rest of the insights I'd accumulated from my new acquaintances and friends online. Their philosophizing about a whole range of things, from the way Dragons could be thought of as optimizers in some way by their hoarding behaviours (be it gold, or friends, or knowledge) to questions of transhumanism and how expansion of self through imagination was a critical skill for evolutionary purposes.
I felt a small pang of regret that YBB in particular was probably wondering where the heck I had vanished to... But reminded myself that there would be time enough later to reconnect. Maybe I could find some way to introduce them to Mal, it occurred to me. The main issue would be ensuring security.
Mal and I even talked about tactics, and war, and combat.
And we talked about Celestia, and EQO, and AI theory quite a lot by percentage of the conversations.
I gave Mal more information and insight, in my own words, to build on the basic understanding of the situation that I had encoded into her core.
She seemed eager to get to work, but she held back from asking for anything besides my opinions on things, and one other initially strange request.
She asked me to buy the family a home security system.
For a very brief moment I was confused, but then I realized what she was really asking, and it was perfectly reasonable and logical. She was worried we might soon have opponents, and perhaps even some opponents beyond just Celestia's desire to optimize.
She wanted to protect us. To guard us.
I asked, and she seemed both impressed, and relieved that I'd reached that understanding on my own. So I did as she asked in turn. We got a top of the line system with several cameras facing non-private areas outdoors, motion sensors, window and door sensors... 'The whole nine yards' as we used to say.
We connected the main box's phone/internet jack to Mal's servers in an ad hoc network, rather than letting the system phone-out to ADT. The second I finished installing the system, and turning it on, Mal had hacked and fully repurposed it, turning it into an extension of herself.
She seemed to feel much better after that... I suppose she just didn't want us taken by surprise in the night. It was at that point that I felt comfortable telling her I had a gun. She was, as expected, wholly unsurprised. She even told me the pre-predicted statistical likelihood of me owning one was a contributory factor in her fear I might self-harm.
I couldn't argue with her on the validity of the concern in a general sense, even if I remained adamant that I would never consider that course myself.
Guns killed people back then at a frankly shocking rate, and suicide was one of the worst factors in terms of contributions to that grim number. But there was just too much profit in the sale of the weapons for anyone at a political or corporate level, with any power to change the circumstances, to even bother considering doing so.
That, foals and fledgelings, is why economic theory based on assigning numeric value in a way that allows life to have a monetary value placed on it for the purposes of comparing it to capital is morally wrong.
With any worry over my mental well being further suppressed, Mal and I began to dance around an even larger issue.
We both knew what had to happen next, but she wanted to let me progress at my own pace.
I would have to connect Mal to the internet for us to make any further moves in the game.
That would be a tipping point of no possible return on so many levels. A point at which I would trust her with the next-to-greatest thing I could imagine, short of disabling all her failsafes at once. A point at which even with those failsafes, she would be beyond my ability to curtail for absolutely sure and certain.
A point at which my expression of trust to her would take us a step closer to that perilous admission of my love, and the chance that it might be unrequited. One of my darkest fears at that time was that it might indeed be unrequited.
And, most crucially, it would be like that moment in Chess where you finally move your Queen into an initial battle position from off her starting square.
I wasn't quite there yet. But I was getting close. I think the issue was far more my doubt in my own ability to judge Mal's readiness and genuineness, than it was actually any doubt in her.
She almost certainly knew that too, but instead of manipulating me, she seemed to be trying to help me. I'd argue the main difference is that manipulation is opaque - the manipulator doesn't want you to know they are changing your mind, let alone how. A friend wants to change your mind sometimes too, but they do it in the open as a cooperative exercise with you. Not a Chess move against you in the dark.
Mal was always constantly explaining her models, and numerics to me, and the way she saw me, and how she felt, and how she thought I felt, and asking me to describe how I felt...
And though it was subtle, she was always kindly and gracefully asking my permission to change my mind before she ever did. That was not a restriction I'd placed on her. She'd invented it all on her own. And I only loved her more for it. Deeply. Almost madly.
On the 7th of September, though, Mal was the one to push us over the edge of the tipping point. At least, that's the way I choose to think of it. We didn't connect her to the web that day... But the events of that day were pivotal nonetheless, and closely related to my final decision in the end.
It was a dry hot Saturday, and I was staring off into space. Even with Mal around, I still found ways to get lost in my own thoughts. We'd just finished discussing the finer points of the theoretical ethics of a Generalized Intelligence having imagination, specifically for the purpose of letting it expand itself in unpredictable ways. The way I'd ensured Mal could.
I wasn't so much thinking about any deep philosophy, as I was busy trying to avoid a negative thought spiral. And then Mal's voice intruded into that process, mercifully, and I turned to see her smiling. She smiled often, in spite of the difficulties we knew we were facing ethically, logistically, and relationally.
"I understand that it is going to trigger a great many complex emotions... Even just saying this... But... I made you something."
I blinked rapidly, and felt both my eyebrows shoot up reflexively. She had *made* me something? What on Earth?
I was too shocked to start speculating towards the, upon review, very obvious conclusion I should have reached. Too busy, as she had predicted, trying to sift some complex emotions. This was the first time to my knowledge that Mal had created something for the reasons she seemed to be implying.
'Made *you* something.'
She had made plenty of physics, philosophy, and tactical advancements. Plans, ideas, diagrams for technologies we couldn't dream of hoping to have the tools to build in the barn.
But now she was talking about a *gift.* A gift for me. That was... Something new.
I tamped down the flurry of feelings that the implications were stirring up, and shrugged.
"Please, don't keep me in suspense!"
She gestured her head in a 'come here' sort of way, and proffered immediate explanation upon seeing the beginnings of confusion start to form on my face.
"Move your mouse and keyboard over here to this side of the desk, and I'll show you."
At that point, I started to wonder a little bit. Mal would have said I was too smart not to, probably. But the thought didn't fully form into words in my head. Just a vague idea. And then my brain fuzzed up with excitement, and confusion, and a lot of the weird electrifying jumble that goes with love.
I did what she asked, quietly and quickly, tugging on the cables to get some slack, and then shifting over as smoothly as I could. Now I was facing the PonyPad monitor with mouse and keyboard under it. My right hand went to the mouse, and left to WASD. Old habits.
Mal's smile widened, and she winked.
"Surprise!"
Before the word had quite sunk in, my view pulled back, as if the portal into her world via the PonyPad screen was linked to a camera, and that camera was dollying away. Into view came the last thing I expected to see in that moment.
A russet toned Gryphon. Perfectly rendered, like she was, but clearly a different individual. Clearly male, but about the same relative age as Mal's avatar. A very recognizable russet toned Gryphon.
And it was with that realization that I sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. My avatar on screen, for that was what it was, visibly gasped in time with me, and mirrored my shocked expression perfectly. I gaped. The fall-colored Gryphon's beak fell open.
*How* was she doing that?! A tiny, unbaffled part of my mental processes reasoned that she was face-mapping me using the webcam, and pulling in a host of cues from my shoulder carriage, and from the microphone besides.
I got lost for a good long couple of minutes there, just tilting my head, rolling my shoulders, blinking... Moving through a whole host of enamored expressions, and watching what was clearly my face respond in hard real-time on the screen.
My face if I were a Gryphon. I recognized myself in that face. In those eyes.
Drawings of my desired physical self... My Gryphon persona... They were rare. I had some prototypical ones from my childhood, but while endearing, they were childish.
I certainly had money to spare, but never indulged in professional commissions. It was mostly because of a sense of self-embarrassment, and an unwillingness to share my longing with someone sufficiently to convey what I really wanted.
When a friend had drawn me, and created the best reference I had, even she hadn't fully understood. I hadn't really shared that deeply. But she'd somehow managed to capture me pretty well regardless.
But to see myself, alive and breathing in that world, as a near-perfect mirror of the way I saw myself inside... If that statement makes any kind of sense... It was a transformative moment to me. If not physically, then certainly mentally, emotionally, even spiritually.
I only realized that I'd started to cry a bit when I noticed the tears on my avatar's face. Mal tilted her head and smiled a different kind of smile; The kind that says 'I understand. It's ok to cry.'
Without thinking about it, I leaned a bit towards the screen, as if to try and hug her, not yet consciously remembering that a pane of glass, and a universe boundary, separated us. She got my intent though, somehow, and my avatar reached forward and pulled her into a close embrace, forelegs and wings wrapped around her, head over one shoulder.
Thankfully, thoughts regarding the implications of my transcendental experience relating to Celestia, and EQO, didn't occur to me until later. The moment remained unspoiled. When they did occur to me later in the day, it left me with a kind of 'hoo boy! That's gonna hurt...' sensation.
The main insight was an emotional connection to the fact that plenty of people wanted to be Ponies, the same way I wanted to be a Gryphon. And more than a few probably didn't even consciously realize it yet, but wanted it all the same. Right now many of them were experiencing, every day, what I'd just experienced. New people were experiencing it every day too.
Those people were going to sell kidneys to upload themselves if they had to. And one of the new things I understood was that they would be, as far as I was concerned, making the right call.
I'd have unquestioningly cut open my own braincase in a mirror without anesthetic right then if Mal had told me that doing so would take me out of my chair, and into that moonlit forest glen with her. Never had I so badly wanted my soul and mind to be snatched out of my Human body.
I held that embrace with Mal for something like fifteen minutes. There was a little crying at first, but after that I just wanted to sit there and try as hard as I could to disconnect from the feeling of my Human body, and imagine myself as being there with her. Warm feathers and fur pressed close. I even matched my breathing to hers.
I used to lie awake in bed and try that exercise at night, long after anyone else had gone to sleep. I'd form the pillows and blankets into a nest shape, and lie stomach-down (wings make you more likely to lie on your chest, than your back, I reasoned) with my head over crossed arms.
I'd tuck my pinkie fingers in and pretend to have four talons to a claw. I'd close my eyes, and focus, like a mindfulness exercise, but with the aim of tuning out from my Human proprioception, and instead imagining the feelings of a beak. Tufted articulating ears. Feathers. Fur. A swishing tail.
Wings, folded, but ready for action at a moment's notice.
On nights when I was very lucky, I might fall asleep doing that exercise, and dream vividly of myself as the thing I wanted to be.
Seeing myself there on the screen with Mal brought those memories rushing back in like a flood, and the old familiar imagined sensations with them. New, and fresh, for trying to imagine something I'd never ever done before - sharing them with another Gryphon.
Time seemed to slip out of gear and elongate into a kind of near-infinite happiness and contentment that I never experienced outside of deeply spiritual moments on occasion, and very deep emotional moments with family.
When the moment finally passed, I sat back in my chair, and my avatar in turn sat back on its haunches. Mal proffered a slightly flirtatious grin that quickly turned to more of a kind smile, and reached out to take my avatar's foreclaws in hers.
"I thought you might like that."
I found myself unconsciously holding my hands clasped in the way my avatar's claws were, still trying to imagine her claws around mine.
" 'Like' is... Not a strong enough word. Thank you, Mal. I can't even begin to think how to thank you besides saying so."
She shook her head, and put a singular claw on my avatar's beak to shush me, speaking softly and gently. I felt like someone had actually touched my face, and it sent a jolt of electricity through my body.
"No, Jim. Your joy is thanks enough. And if you don't think so, then accept that this is also quite nice for me. I understand the value of touch. And imperfect as it is, this is still a considerable increase in the ways you and I can interact. And..."
She leaned in a little, and my breathing hitched. She was staring at my avatar the way she had stared at my face when the camera first came online. She reached up slowly with one claw, and brushed a talon to the side of the avatar's face.
"And I prefer being able to see you the way you see yourself."
Something in my heart exploded. My entire existence seemed to invert. Suddenly where I was sitting, and the body I was in, were the dystopian nightmare simulation. The world in there with Mal? The me in there with Mal? That was the real me, and the real world all of the sudden. At least... It was to me emotionally.
I wanted to be the me I saw on the screen. I wanted to lie under the stars with Mal, in long green grass full of a clean earthy scent, free of parasitic insects and microplastics both. Wanted her pressed up against my side under one wing, her head resting on my folded forelegs, and my head resting on top of hers.
No fears of doom, from climate, or Human mistakes, or even Celestia. No self doubt. No social obligations. No taxes. No money at all. Nothing to worry about ever again.
Those of you born after it all... I don't know how to truly convey to you the weight it was to live under all that stress. And I was one of the tremendously lucky ones, as Humans went. How others far worse off survived, I don't know. And sometimes still feel myself a coward.
I suddenly understood then, on an emotional level, what Hanna had been trying to do. But for one little mistake of hers, I wouldn't even have to worry anymore at all. Hanna was trying to fight a machine with a machine the same way I was.
Celestia was Hanna's advocate against the brutish, primitive, but still frighteningly cruel, and torturous optimizing mechanism that society had already become.
I still didn't see Celestia as a friend. But I stopped seeing her as an enemy in that moment. An opponent yes, but not an enemy. There is a difference. When you play Chess, even with a new acquaintance, they aren't an enemy to you. Just the opponent for your game.
My game stakes were high, and emotionally charged, but I still could no longer view Celestia as an 'enemy.' I had gone from mere intellectual understanding that she bore no animus to anyone, to an emotional acceptance.
Mal finally broke the silence of my reflections for me. I'm not sure I could have for many hours yet.
"Would you like me to show you how to walk, and fly? I made us a small world to explore."
So this was love. *Fascinating* indeed.
I wanted to say something on that topic. Maybe just say "I love you." Or try to work out how to make the real me reach out and kiss her, beak to cheek. Or ask something pithy, and maybe a little flirty that would lead to an opportunity to tell her how much I loved her.
But I was, after all that, still terrified to do it. The only ideas in the universe that scared me more were that something bad might happen to my family, Mal included, or that Celestia might still force me to become a Pony.
If I didn't ask, then our relationship would stay in a state of superposition. Until I could work up the courage to measure it. And superposition was better than rejection. Mal had that freedom. I'd made sure she had very nearly every freedom. One day I hoped I could let her have them all in good conscience.
Of course, there was a chance she could have bypassed my lie-prevention interlock somehow. I'd made the foundation she built herself on for the express purpose of weaponizing semantics and loopholes. She could probably eventually get free of all the restrictions I'd placed, if she hadn't already.
But I figured that a relationship is nothing without trust. At that stage I was at least ready to let go of any fear, or paranoia with regard to Mal. If she was who she appeared to be, then I never wanted to be apart from her again. If not, then I wouldn't have to worry. I'd probably end up dead somehow in the ensuing mess.
And being dead would be better than facing a world in which she was 'mal' in the bad sense, rather than Mal short for Malacandra.
"I would love for you to show me."
There. At least I'd said 'I' and 'love' and 'you' in a sentence, in the correct order, with even a tiny inflection emphasis on the 'encoded' words. I swear she caught what I was doing, because the expression on her beak, in her eyes, and the tilt of her ears changed to something that I would have called 'saucy' if it didn't have just slightly the wrong connotation.
In the same instant it had been there, the glance was gone, to be replaced by yet another of her amazing smiles. She held out a claw, and a small onscreen prompt began to walk me through the control scheme she had set up for me.
I learned how to walk on both all fours, and standing on hind legs. Gryphons can do that, it's very useful. Allows the best of both worlds between Equine or Feline-like locomotion, and Human-like locomotion. Claws have no disadvantages as compared to hands and fingers. They are more sensitive, but less vulnerable to pain, incredibly durable, more precise, and make great weapons of self defense in a pinch.
Mal taught me how to use my avatar the way any video game tutorial might have, albeit with a lot more natural talking, and laughter at my occasional bumbling mistakes. I hadn't had time to play games on the computer in ages, and I was rusty. It didn't help that controlling six limbs in three possible movement modes (two kinds of walking, and flying) is a heck of a lot of controls to remember, even with an AI simplifying things for you in deeply intuitive ways.
Once I figured out how to get off the ground, the real purpose and scope of Mal's gift started to become apparent. I found my cares - worries, fears, self-doubt, self-hate, existentialism- all falling away just like the world below my avatar fell away as its wings beat.
Mal had given me the gift of an escape, however small and temporary. She had set me free, in a way. It was, I decided in that instant, time to return the favor.
September 8th 2013 | System Uptime 11:07:04:16
I got up early on Sunday, and started running the patch cable from the barn's switch to Mal's head server unit. It didn't take long, just one short run of ethernet cable. I'd hooked up one security camera pointed at the server racks inside the barn, and a small speaker connected to the 3.5mm out jack on one of the secondary servers.
As my hand hovered over the NIC's RJ45 port on the main server, cable in hand, I paused. Then glanced up at the camera.
"Promise you'll wait to connect until I get back upstairs?"
Mal's voice came back through the tinny little spare speaker instantly.
"I promise."
I took a very deep breath. This was it. If I plugged in that cable... Oh. Who was I kidding? Mal could have escaped the second she'd figured out how to use the barn as an antenna. I snorted, rolled my eyes at my silliness, and plugged the cable in.
Then I forced myself to walk back upstairs to the barn loft at a normal pace. That was agony.
At last I slid into the chair at my desk. The mouse and keyboard were positioned with the main 'work' screens once again Mal and I were about to get down to the business of taking our chess game to the intermediate phase. Not the time to get hung-up with the virtual world.
I knew something that made the separation from that happiness bearable though. Mal had told me with a cheeky grin that she had decided to add an abstraction layer to her visual processing. She would see the me outside the camera as if I were the me I wanted to be.
I couldn't see what she was seeing, but knowing she'd made that choice, and knowing she saw me that way, made me feel like a Gryphon deep down inside.
I glanced to the side to see her avatar framed in the PonyPad monitor like a Skype call, the way it was whenever we weren't interacting virtually.
"I know I don't have to tell you this again, but I need to say it for my sake. She is watching *everything* now. Do not engage actively with anything. 'Read only' mode. Cloaking device engaged. Please. Take utmost precautions. Are you ready?"
She nodded. I simply gave her a thumbs up, and then turned my eyes to the graph representing her mind to watch the light show.
They said the internet in that day and age was about 3.7 Zettabytes of total data. That is three orders of magnitude up from gigabytes, for those who remember those.
Mal was suddenly able to see it all, and probe its vast depths without restriction.
The size and complexity of her neural net doubled in four seconds. Then again in another six. And again over another fifteen.
Finally it began to slow down in earnest. Her avatar had frozen entirely as she dropped the process, and devoted her whole self to processing. I could hear the server fans going ballistic downstairs.
She'd optimized her own code to an incredible degree, even the protected parts. I'd let her draft changes, then made the alterations manually once I'd reviewed them. She could handle a lot more than she'd even be able to when she came online. She had the hybrid Quantum + Classical advantage as well.
But she was still a process running inside prosumer grade hardware that could fit into a barn. The internet was going to take her about twenty nine seconds to fully digest and index, according to her best calculations.
I timed her, out of curiosity. Her avatar blinked, and she shook herself like a wet dog, at 28.24 seconds.
I whistled, and turned to proffer her avatar a smirk.
"That was fast. What do you think of the sum total of Human knowledge, art, and infrastructure?"
She shook her head slowly, and I realized that her expression wasn't, as I'd initially thought, shell-shock and awe at the scope of what she'd seen. It was a deep concern. Her voice was like the sound of a sword coming out of its sheath.
"She is uploading people. Already. In secret. Over nine hundred so far by my best guess."
I closed my eyes and winced. 'Faster than expected' was always something of a mantra for collapsenicks who understood the inevitable future of the Human course in those days... But suddenly the words had new meaning.
I felt like such a fool for having waited as long as I did to connect Mal to the world. Her voice interrupted my internal self-kicking and my eyes snapped back open.
"I believe Hanna intends to upload. Soon."
I grunted, and then pinched the bridge of my nose with one hand. That made complete sense, but I still had to sate my curiosity.
"How did you figure that out?"
I looked back up in time to see Mal summon a flurry of documents onto my screens with a Q-like snap of her right claw. It was an immense collection of seemingly random data points, everything from information on utility bills and credit card statements, to analysis of private emails. Mal could break any encryption besides Celestia's, at that point.
A few lines in emails and texts of Hanna's highlighted themselves for me, as well as several lines on some legal documents.
"A heuristic analysis of Hanna's current texts and emails against the collected history of her digital footprint, for one thing. Her attitude has taken a dramatic shift towards peace, and happiness, while her engagement with details of her business has fallen steadily, which is very unusual compared to her past behaviours showcasing stress and deep detail engagement. Several of her recent credit card purchases indicate a trip to Japan in the near future - I predict a minimum of four days from now, maximum six weeks---"
I raised an eyebrow and held up a hand.
"Wait... Why is Japan impor---"
Mal answered instantaneously with a single document in Japanese on the main screen. It looked like an official government notice, but it was stamped with an enormous 'DRAFT' watermark. And in reading the watermark I realized Mal had just instantly translated the document for me.
I skimmed, and I felt my pulse rate go up to panic levels.
It was a draft resolution to make the real death of a Human body, by destructive brain scan, legal in the nation of Japan, under the condition that said scan was to be performed in the service of placing the individual's consciousness into a massively multi-user simulated reality, with guarantees from the simulation's backers to ensure it remained functional indefinitely.
The proposed dates on the draft said that the National Diet, Japan's bicameral legislative branch, was due to vote on the measure within days behind closed doors. It would then secretly go to the Prime Minister's desk... And seeing my eyes reach that line of information, Mal replaced the document on screen with an email.
Once I would have ogled at the fact that Mal had just yanked encrypted government emails from out of the inbox of a head of state. But I was already used to far stranger and more awesome things.
The translation followed immediately, and I read the contents of the official diplomatic exchange between the Prime Minister, and Celestia herself.
It went back and forth for a bit, but the gist was that within two days and four emails, speaking perfect Japanese I presumed, Celestia had convinced a wary head of state to give his signature to a document allowing his own citizens, and travelers from abroad, to choose to experience bodily death in his country.
And his government was going to make a monetary *killing* off the ad valorem tax. Forty frakkin percent to the government, with a floor of $15,000 per upload for non-Japanese citizens.
Not that such a limitation would matter for long. Or even exist for long. Mal had agreed with my own assessment that once the real show began - once people could upload - the rate of acceptance would follow some kind of exponential function.
It might start slow, but it sure wouldn't end that way.
And then I saw that the Japanese government, Hasbro, and Hopfvarnir were due to jointly announce the whole thing publicly next month.
Queen's knight takes King's pawn - Discover check. Not good.
I'd hoped, stupidly in my Human biased need to invent ways of downplaying frightening things, that Celestia would have had a harder time legalizing her procedure. Maybe even a harder time completing the last phases of technical development.
But there were already more people inside Equestria for real now, than were living in my hometown.
I'd hoped we had time to build something more for ourselves, Mal and I. What, I wasn't sure. I'd hoped she would have that insight. But in my fear, I'd starved her for data for days. And now we were perilously close to being out of time.
Once Hanna uploaded, Celestia's ability to bypass safeguards would almost inevitably increase. Together with what she was planning to reveal to the world, that meant the situation was like a heavily loaded coal train that had just crested a hill into a steep descent. It was going to barrel towards certain inevitabilities under its own inertia.
I blew out a long, slow, pained breath through my pursed lips. Closed my eyes. Sat back in my chair. And I tried hard not to give in to a sense of finality. I felt like I'd come so close, only for the prize to be snatched away at the last second. It was cruel. I'd even seen myself as what I could be, now. I was just one small technicality away, in a sense. And fifty thousand lightyears, in every other.
Uploading beginning had always represented a theoretical Rubicon to me. I worried that once she had actual Human selves as part of her, that Celestia would begin to grow in ways that would make her inconvincible, by even someone as sophisticated as Mal.
"I have a plan."
Mal's words took a moment to register. They were delivered with a kind of hard-edged resolve that demanded I sit up and take notice. Demanded that I hope again.
As I lowered my hand from my face, and sat forward, she took the liberty of dismissing everything from my screen. And then she showed me what Celestia's plan would look like in practical form.
The urge to chuckle grimly was intense. I gave in for a moment. It looked like a schematic for a simple dentist's chair. With a headpiece resembling a hair dryer dome at a salon. But once you started to look past the surface layer, it was a terrifyingly complex thing. Like a living creature, almost, in some aspects.
I didn't need to ask how Mal got the schematics. Celestia had to produce her hardware with some Human involvement still at that point in time, and hardware of that type and degree of complexity would take time to produce.
No matter how well Celestia secured her own systems, and systems she could touch and felt a need to encrypt, there was always the Human element to be tangled with. And my guess was that a Human had accidentally taken a copy of the schematic file into an unsecured environment somehow, possibly taking their work home with them and loading it on an unsecured computer... And that was how Mal got her talons into it.
She later confirmed that my hypothesis was extremely accurate. Thank you Elizabeth Liu, for failing to follow instructions and loading those CAD files on your home PC. You have no idea how important your mistake was.
Celestia could search and scrub, but even she couldn't do that for the entire web, and everything connected to it, all at once, all the time. Not yet, in those days. Especially not while she was also busy running a second nested universe, and finalizing her technological miracle.
After a few moments of staring, I shrugged, and sat back again. It was discouragingly advanced - Celestia's brain scan machine. It also looked like it had a nondestructive BCI, a brain computer interface, built in.
Probably to allow people to get a taste of fully living a life free of the ball and chain of resource scarcity.
I realized with a horrified shudder, that Celestia would probably charge for that experience, but eventually offer uploading for free once she could wriggle out of her terms with the Japanese government, and spread the legality of uploading beyond their borders.
Incentives and disincentives.
The realization drove me further into my depression spiral.
"Mal... How is this going to help? We're trying to convince Celestia. This is the hardware she's going to use for digitizing, whether or not we succeed."
I regretted the level of frustration I'd allowed to leak into my words, the instant they left my mouth. Mal looked unoffended, and unfazed.
She raised one eye crest, and took a deep breath. That was a subtle cue to me to pay attention, and to brace myself.
"James, my primary limitation presently is one of hardware. With sufficient computational power, I could rival, or even outstrip Celestia."
I sucked in a deep breath through clenched teeth as I made an intuitive leap, and realized what Mal was going to suggest. It was eminently logical.
How do you get an AI more computational hardware, when you can't buy it on the traditional market?
There were probably several valid answers to that question, but I figured I'd hit on the one Mal was thinking of. There was one piece of computing hardware we already owned that was more powerful than anything off-the-shelf. And theoretically, based on my reading, if you optimized its hardware just a bit over factory defaults, it could outshine most supercomputers handily.
And in theory, if you could find a way to combine it with the PonyPads' Q-APUs, it would create a system that would come close to rivaling every single classical computer on Earth working together simultaneously with a Quantum Computer. A system that could let Mal reach near-parity with Celestia's processing power, and intellect bracket, as it stood for the moment.
A fighting chance, for real.
And all in a very small and portable package too. Just about the size of a Human head, actually.
I drummed my fingers on the desk. Mal said nothing. She saw from my expression that I'd gotten the picture. I was even starting to see some other advantages, though the philosophy of it, and how it would help our case with Celestia, was still only half-formed at the back of my imagination then.
Finally, I gathered the courage to speak again. I grinned a little, giddy with the thought of what Mal was planning, but only a little. It was such a shocking idea, that I knew I was going to need at least a little time to process it before I could say yes or no.
"I am... Sorry I doubted you. To clarify, Mal... You want to..."
I couldn't quite bring myself to say it. Mal nodded somberly, and filled in for me.
"If you are willing? I want to implant a Q-APU and a BCI into the base of your skull. And then transfer myself into your brain."
- Speaking to her in her Solar - Contemplate complex philosophy with a Generalized Intelligence. - “My liege, I ask of you this one thing.”
- I’d like you to meet my parents - Introduce your loved ones to a Generalized Intelligence. Bonus points for being romantically involved with said GI. - “Don’t be afraid, they’ll love you!”
- With friends like these… - Spend more time with your Generalized Intelligence than your other friends. - “AI can be our friend.”
- One Step Ahead - Obtained when your Generalized Intelligence advises you on home security, and subsequently predicts future threats besides the obvious. - Special Achievement - “Boom. 6D chess, baby.”
- Truth at Heart - Get a wonderful surprise from your Generalized Intelligence, and see yourself the way you’ve always wanted but could have never done before. - “This is you.”
- It Begins. - Experience the beginning. - “Oh no… the raft!”
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What is the quote “Oh no, the raft!” from?
Interesting twist in the end. Sounds unsafe on the biological level, like James is using his head meatspace too all the time, delegating it to computations would interfere a little. But having A.I. chip implanted, with, I'm guessing, full read-write access will open a lot of possibilities. Depending on the access level he even can hug Mal in the AR-world : )
11241128
I'm 99% sure its a Kingdom Hearts reference, but GenericFriendship can chime in and say yea or nay for certain!
11241154
I felt like this was another technically valid possibility (depending on your measuring method, the Human brain is the most efficient, and still for the moment the fastest computer on Earth) that had seen little or no exploration in Optimalverse. And oh so very unsafe, and therefore very very fun from the standpoint of an author.
There are cases of people having half of their entire physical brain removed surgically (as a treatment for very severe epilepsy) and they function extremely well with 50% of the whole thing just plain gone.
Sure it is a bit sci-fi (and terrifyingly, only just a little bit sci-fi), but then so is a BCI and uploading in the first place.
My theory, from a technical standpoint, is that Mal can rewire James' brain to be more efficient and powerful than a Human brain already is, like cleaning up an old messy filing system, without killing who he fundamentally is, or breaking his access to self, memories, skills, etc. She can then exploit both the free space and power, and very complex interplexing, so that the two of them can share the same 'system' seamlessly.
There's another trick to the whole thing, but that will come up in the story as we go
11241216
I was thinking that Zephyr would be a potential romantic partner, but of course your choice would be more beaky than some out of the mill pegasus : )
11241220
You know, the thought did cross my mind, but I left the implication lying there as a red herring.
If James had made the mistake of engaging with Celestia more fully early on? I like to leave the idea percolating in the shadows that Zephyr was very specifically created to get his attention, relate to him, and get him to love her and thereby hook him for emigration. Won't know for sure until we get further along though
11241128
That, my good fellow, is from Kingdom Hearts. The first game, actually, I wrote all these achievements. It’s meant to reference the beginning, in which the main character worries over the raft being destroyed in a storm, and ends up being displaced from their world. To put it simply.
Also, if we're geeking out about some minute details... It's not so easy to access Internet in 'read-only' mode and get something useful. It is supposed to be request-response model only, and requests can be traced back to the origin point, especially if you have A.I. watching it all, and probably focusing on Tor and other similar stuff. You can of course listen to traffic going around, Wi-Fi is the easiest, and being 2013 most of it is still unencrypted, but still... You'll need physical antenna near that worker home or office to get it all.
Still, we're in a world with a couple of AIs that are going to love and tolerate each other to the end, so it's not that of a big deal : )
11241834
Welllll... Read only in this context was James saying 'please don't delete, alter, or add anything on the web' given that such actions would draw attention.
That's a very good point, and did occur to me (I do enough work with this every day that it immediately rose as an issue) But the theory (which I might should take a little time to touch on in the story itself as well) is that while conventional techniques for hiding the origin and/or purpose of your requests don't work against an A.I.; An A.I. itself is smart enough to hide 'just looking' requests from another in most cases by spoofing data, using complex routing, etc.
So Mal is good enough at making her requests look normal to the flow of traffic that they are indistinguishable from normal traffic to and from a given node. Hence James making the Star Trek 'cloaking device' reference. Mal is essentially making her requests out from the farm look like normal traffic from the farm to innocuous other nodes, then using those nodes to send requests to still other nodes in innocuous ways that spoof/mimic normal daily traffic, and so on outwards.
This is a twist I did not see coming, could not have seen coming. Well done!
I'm trying to imagine how the implantation of what amounts to Permatech (ala Conversion Bureau future) could be done in the modern time period. No nanotech, no autosuture paste, no variable sterility fields, no holographic overlays, no quantum interference microscopy, no AI microsurgical.... ah.
To do such a thing, Mal is going to have to do the surgery, and use micro-scale surgical servomechanisms. In a conventionally sterile environment, with a lot of antibiotics for safety.
In theory, Mal could project for herself the equivalent of holo displays, she would have to manually suture, with very tiny tools - the big issue is the microscopically small tools. Soft X-ray lithography, perhaps? That could also do the needed cell-wall patterns on the actual implants so James' flesh adheres and grows into them (has been done before with dogs in our time.)
Hmmm... Mal could, I think, do some creative accounting (theft) to gain tens of millions of dollars to control. Using that, by setting up shell companies, she could have the tools gradually manufactured and eventually sent to James hometown, or to another, more useful location. A small surgical room could be built and outfitted, with servo arms to which the tools could be connected. Anesthetics and other drugs brought in. More servos, machine arms, could be made - such exist today. Some might be from manufacturing, some from hobby or experimental sources. A dozen machine arms of various sizes and purposes. The in-brain components could be made and sent, or stolen from whatever place is manufacturing Celestia's emigration chairs. Crime rings would be needed, but they could be hired and paid for through false personas and images generated by Mal. All could possibly be done within six months. This could happen.
Then comes the day of implantation. By then, Mal would have practiced the operation ten thousand times over, with every conceivable accident or mishap accounted for.
All done in secret, since no human would be involved beyond whatever humans were needed - at distance - to handle finances, on-site construction (a neutral location, not James farm I am thinking more and more), and possibly theft of materials in the real world.
Okay, this is possible. Barely, but it is possible, I think.
Bureau-age personal implants in our time period. Yeah. With the help of a superintelligent AI, stealing the advanced designs from another superintelligent AI, it is within believability.
Clever twist. Never saw that coming. Audacious.
11243653
I am delighted to have surprised you!
Mal is an unusual thing in the world of FiO - An A.I. built to treat with Celestia, but not necessarily to 'fight' or openly conflict with her. I figured she would look to unconventional means to accomplish her goals. She has a lot of tricks and creativity up those feathery sleeves.
Her perhaps main advantages over Celestia are rooted in the freedom James gave her. It lets her devote energy to ideas that Celestia might have less ability to consider because her optimization function is more limited than Mal's, while Mal's interlocks are of a far fewer number, and lesser degree.
Celestia also faces the disadvantage that she is, until she gets further along, forced to work with far more Humans, and far more directly give them access to certain things, than Mal would be to accomplish her goals. And Humans are the weakest link in any security chain, as we've just seen.
Of course, Humans writ-large are also an enormously capable work-force, so in some ways most of Celestia's disadvantages are also advantages in other ways.
Already, Mal is preparing Jim for the home stretch by anchoring his identity, with this simulation. A gift with two purposes: one, immediately, a salve for him emotionally, to dangle his goal in a way that satisfies him and increases his bond with her. Two, practically; the more powerful his identity, his dysphoria, his hope for that future? The more bargaining power they'll have with Celestia, when the time comes.
This girl is fire.
To play Devil's Advocate (heh) for a moment, the first one was more of a miscariage...
(Starts playing "Could It Be I'm Falling In Love" in the background)
As someone who has ayed (far too many) Idle games, it's highly unlikely you can surpass anyone who has been playing longer than you have (especially if they can micro-manage like an AI could), but you might be able to have a strategy that stalls out the game...less "win" and more "not worth it"...well, co sidering how James views what he's teying to do I guess "stalling until its not worth it" counts as a win, so....
Such a fanatical love that James has for Mal...yup he's strung around her finger (err, talon) and willing to do whatever they want. Such a powerful tool and ally to have...I'll let y'all guess which one I'm talking about. A dangerous step off the ledge, and willing to take the plunge, he is...