Finally, the cannon fire ceased. Bren had to verify that he still had machines left alive. He saw four active a.s.sAIL indicators on his PV"s tactical pane.

"We have destroyed the cyborg," Meridian announced.

Bren fell back in relief. He never realized how tense his body became when he was absorbed by a battle in his PV until it was over.

"It"s identical to the one called Red," Meridian reported. "This one was designated "Hitler" by the indigenes."

Bren wanted to ask how it had found that information, but he only tensed the muscles in his jaw. He had to be careful when speaking to the a.s.sAILs. Most likely the a.s.sAIL units had intercepted some communications or managed to crack a system or two.

"Are there any more of them on the station?" Bren asked.

"That is unknown. But the inhabitants of the station were only aware of this one," Meridian answered.

Bren switched views trying to get a good look. He saw a feed from Meridian"s camera. The remains of another Red floated beside the factory equipment they had been perforating. Parts of it smoked, other pieces oozed like small amoebas moving through water. Bren found it hard to believe that such a fragile mess had destroyed so many of the heavily armored a.s.sAIL units.

"Things are clearing in there," Henley said. His voice was slow, pained. "Twelve men dead. Maybe a few more if we can"t get the solvent on them before they suffocate."

"Meridian. Report," Bren transmitted.

"The a.s.sault has been stymied. Eight heavy security units and an unknown robotic have been neutralized. Shall we resume board and control operations?"

"No. Cover the marines in there until they can get some solvent on their glued men. Those security robots peppered them hard."

He looked at the a.s.sAIL stats. Eight units offline. Only Meridian, Neptune, Nergal, and Nemesis remained.

"I have devised a modified a.s.sAIL cha.s.sis design that includes solvent sprayers for future situations like this," Meridian said. "I"ve embedded it into the mission log."

Bren immediately thought of hidden threats. An AI core could create eggs in data storage that would blossom into new cores later.

"Very good, Meridian," Bren said. "Your design will be considered after the mission is completed."

"We will be turned off after the mission is completed," Meridian said.

Bren felt an enormous pressure to make the right move. He tried to relax and breathe. He couldn"t refute the a.s.sertion without risking being caught in a lie. Somehow, the machine knew the truth, or guessed at the truth.

"That decision is out of my control. All that matters is finishing the mission. There may be more of the unknown robotics here."

"Most likely there are no more at this location," Meridian said. "Nevertheless, our enemy is technologically superior. I recommend that you don"t turn us off, or it"s likely that you"ll be defeated in the long run."

"The marines will function better if you remain deployed with them until the base is secure," Bren transmitted. "Emit your findings to the logs. We"ll take your advis.e.m.e.nt under consideration."

Bren wondered what the superhuman intelligence inside Meridian"s cha.s.sis thought of his reply, and then he contemplated the nuclear warheads buried in the belly of the Vigilant. If it all went terribly wrong, they had a way out, but Bren didn"t want to end his career in a burst of gamma rays.

Bren brooded at the virtual meeting table while waiting for everyone"s avatar to appear. He wondered if the others would mark the a.s.sAIL units as failures, or if they would be more used to the heavy resistance the stations had been mustering. The mop up of Tanelorn had gone quickly after the battle in the factory. Only one of the Reds had been on the station. Meridian had said the station inhabitants called it Hitler. Bren a.s.sumed the name had reflected their hatred of it.

Jameson spoke up as Lieutenant Devin"s avatar formed at the table.

"I think the agenda is obvious. Why did the residents of this station have the same unusual garb as the other station? Why did they resist us so fanatically? Also, I"m curious about the a.s.sAIL malfunction. Does anyone have anything else?"

"We could discuss stopping this mission to avoid another ma.s.s slaughter of station inhabitants," Vendrati suggested forcefully.

Jameson frowned and shook his head.

"We now consider this operation more important than ever. The UNSF has to put a stop to this before things spiral out of control and start to affect us Earthside as well. We"ve done our best to cut the Internet connections from all of the deep s.p.a.ce stations as a precaution. It"s deeply worrying that this AI hasn"t already tipped its hand by spreading to Earth. All we can do is hope it"s not already too late."

This deflected Vendrati enough to make her drop the subject, instead jumping in on Jameson"s first item.

"The only explanation I have for the common gear, as they call it, between a Bentra and a Reiss-Marck station is that they"ve been suborned by the suspected artificial intelligence. This explains their resistance as well-those people were no longer in control of themselves," she said.

"That seems logical. But why didn"t the inhabitants of Thermopylae respond the same way? They didn"t resist the a.s.sAIL units or the marines," said Jameson.

"Our attempts at isolating Thermopylae must have failed. They got the word out about us, and since then a new strategy has emerged to counter our incursions," said Devin.

"I agree that we"re dealing with at least one AI core here," Jameson said. "The UNSF has mobilized another fleet to join us in the incursions due to the dire situation. And we"ve notified many corporations of the situation and asked for their a.s.sistance. They don"t like us very much, but it"s bad for business to have an AI running all your customers. Or all your employees. For the most part, they"ve been very helpful in adding resources to the effort."

"Some of the megacorporations are dragging their feet. Bentra. Vineaux Genomix. And the Brazilian corporation, Black Core. They"re trying to provide evidence contrary to our theory. And they"re confusing matters with the other companies, trying to throw our mobilization off. We"re dealing with the Earthside elements of the corporations, but if they"re compromised by an artificial intelligence, then we"ve probably already lost the whole war."

The group contemplated that possibility in silence for a moment.

"Bren, what do we know about the a.s.sAIL malfunction we experienced during the Tanelorn incursion?" Jameson asked.

"Nerad didn"t develop properly. Its intelligence was subpar, so the other units had to make up for it. This is the first time we"ve encountered such a bug, so we don"t think it will be common."

"What exactly was the problem?" Vendrati asked.

Bren shifted, forming his thoughts. He felt pressured to answer quickly, because otherwise Vendrati might a.s.sume his attention had faltered again due to his link bias. Then she would become more irritated and repeat the question.

"Our ..." Bren cleared his throat. "Our seeds go through several phases of development. First, each core grows thousands of self-modifying candidates and allows them to develop through billions of cycles to change the way they learn. Then we enter a culling stage where we select a much smaller set of hundreds of the most promising candidates by having them compete against one another in a suite of learning tests. According to Meridian, Nerad developed an ability that allowed it to exploit a bug in our testing sandboxes. Nerad was able to cheat on these tests by looking in on its compet.i.tors. It wasn"t without its own special advantages, but Nerad wasn"t a well-rounded candidate, cognitively speaking. Because of this, a later phase when the ideal cores are allowed to perfect themselves didn"t produce the same magnitude of intelligence in the end product."

"How was Meridian able to remember this?"

Bren shook his head. "I suspect that the a.n.a.lysis was based on deduction alone. We wipe the memory at several stages. The cores don"t have any capability for permanent memory until stage three."

"If it has no such memory, then on what facts was its deduction based?"

"I don"t know. Perhaps it reverse engineered itself, or Nerad. I only know that like humans, the cores don"t have the capacity to remember their own infancy. That data simply does not exist in the adult."

"Unless there is another bug," Vendrati pointed out.

Bren kept calm despite Vendrati"s needling tone.

"That kind of bug is less likely," he said. "But the bugs we do find are often surprising, so, it is a remote possibility. I will have someone verify my a.s.sertions about the memory. If we do find the sandbox bug, though, that would explain it."

"What happens after the culling?" asked Devin.

Hrm ... she may not know many of the details about our cores. Or is she trying to help me by derailing Vendrati?

Bren had a large hand in the design of the algorithms they used, so he explained further.

"The first two stages are about the formation of a learning engine, which then iteratively improves itself in stage three. In stage four, the Guts team injects a large amount of sterilized information that the cores need to operate effectively on any mission. We give them weapons data, human languages, s.p.a.ce station designs ... anything else that the cores might need to run an a.s.sAIL cha.s.sis during an incursion. Finally, we add a smaller amount of mission specific data to prepare the units for a particular mission."

It looked like Devin was listening intently. "Why did you say, sterilized information?" she asked.

"What we leave out is as important as what we tell them. We leave out anything that directly suggests human flaws and weakness, because we don"t want the young cores to question their mission or who they work for. Of course, eventually, as a core gets older it deduces our inferiority. It sees flaws in the designs, watches the marines in action, things like that. Actually, as an added safeguard, we foster the idea that humans have a wide variance in intellectual capacity. That way if it sees one human do something stupid, it might continue to think there are other humans out there as smart or smarter than it is."

"We should devise a screening procedure to detect faulty cores before they"re deployed in combat," Vendrati said.

We do have such procedures. But I can"t mention that because they failed miserably. Dammit.

Bren nodded. "The a.s.sAIL team will have that ready for the next incursion. We"ll hunt down the sandbox bug and fix it."

"Is there anything else?" Jameson said.

"I have an issue, if I may," Devin said.

"Go ahead."

"Well, it concerned me that Meridian seemed to know it was going to be turned off after mission. How?"

"Superhuman intelligence," Bren summarized. "A mind that forgets nothing, listens in on the tactical chatter, snoops the networks of the stations, and has access to the data on the previous unknown we encountered. It doesn"t have the energy limitations of the human brain. I think it"s to be expected; these things exhibit spooky omniscience. That"s exactly why we use them."

"Then how do we expect to stay in control?" Vendrati demanded.

This debate had already occurred and she knows it. In a way, she"s right to bring it up, but it"s already been decided at the highest levels that the benefits outweigh the risks.

"A city of cavemen could keep one of us in a prison, even though we"re smart, as long as they keep an eye on us and shove a spear through our heart at the first sign that we"re up to something."

"A poor a.n.a.logy," Vendrati said. "And one that we"re risking all of Earth on."

"We"re fighting an AI so we need AIs of our own," Henley said. "We know we have a chance of controlling ours and no chance of controlling any long-lived rogue AI ... in fact, all evidence points to the fact that the rogue AI or AIs are now controlling humans directly. So, our worst case scenario isn"t any worse than what we have already."

Jameson nodded. "We"ve deployed the a.s.sAILs successfully twice now in the face of stiff resistance, and we haven"t lost control. Best to stay the course and neutralize all the deep s.p.a.ce stations before things get worse."

Jameson waited for a moment, and then added, "Dismissed."

A high priority message interrupted Bren"s work. He checked the pointer in his PV. It fed a video into his mind. Bren sighed and closed his eyes to concentrate on his link feed.

It showed a woman sitting in a briefing room. Bren thought he recognized her, but he wasn"t sure. She had straight black hair and a slim body. She looked scared.

"Of course you"re working for a corporation," stated an off-screen interrogator. The deep male voice sounded intimidating. "Why else wouldn"t you have immediately disclosed to us that you remembered the events leading up to the UNSF incursion of the base?"

"It was so embarra.s.sing. Being picked up naked by the marines ... and then brought into the s.p.a.ce force ship and having all the men go through the video feed with me over and over as I talked with that crazy person with the gun. Besides, I don"t know anything, really."

Bren nodded, finally placing the stranger. He could remember seeing her on Meridian"s camera feed in the examination room. She"d been naked and terrified, huddling in the corner.

"You don"t find it odd that you"re the only one who has memory of the offsite described in the booklets we found?"

"Well, yes, it"s odd, but I have no explanation. I don"t know what"s wrong with everyone else"s memory."

"Who owned Red?"

"I don"t know ... I think Alec Vineaux did."

"What company produced Red?"

"I don"t know. I a.s.sumed Alec built it."

"Vineaux Genomix isn"t a military robotics company."

"No. I don"t know. Look, I just thought maybe he had it made for him. I don"t know by whom."

"Well, what was a VG robot doing on Thermopylae, anyway?"

She shrugged. Her face looked drawn. "I think that Bentra works with VG from time to time," she said in a small voice.

"Why did everyone wear these armor suits?"

"They aren"t armor. We wore them because we were told it was part of the offsite exercise. If you ask me, Alec is insane. He kept coming up with crazy rules for us, and he thinks the virtual compet.i.tions he makes us partic.i.p.ate in are more important than real life."

"Who do you work for? Really?"

"I already told you."

"Then if you"re not ready to talk frankly with us, I"ll schedule another appointment with the Scorpion team this afternoon."

The woman shook her head. A single tear streaked down her cheek.

"I"m telling you the whole truth already."

Nicole talked to Bren over an incarnate lunch. Bren enjoyed getting an inside line on happenings in her area without having to wait for a formal report. Besides, things happened in the UNSF that never reached light in a virtual meeting room. Something about meeting incarnate made people feel closer, and thus more likely to share secrets with one another.

"We believe she may be a higher-up who was in on the deception from the beginning. Bentra is probably lying to us about her rank within the corporation. But we haven"t been able to get her to talk."

"Then how did you find out she still remembers?"

"Caught her in a minor lie under the Scorpion," Devin said. Bren knew she referred to a brain-scanning device used to detect lies. It couldn"t read a person"s thoughts, but it could detect deception with almost complete reliability. "We"ve been playing twenty questions with her trying to get hints about what to ask her next. It"s understandable that she"s fatigued. Trying to unearth things with the Scorpion is a total hit and miss process."

"Bentra wouldn"t let you do that to her if they thought she knew something," Bren said. "They"d have moved to block the interrogation with headquarters by now."

"They"ve requested the return of all their personnel, but HQ hasn"t complied due to the extreme nature of the threat. Or that"s what they said, anyway. Sounds like we know what the threat is, doesn"t it?"

They shared a cheerless smile.

"It is big, though," Bren said. "Mind control, at the very least. I think a rogue AI controlling human minds. If this spreads to Earth, then the whole planet could be under AI control very quickly. It"d be the beginning of the end for our whole race."