Nanowrimo 2011 - Day 19

[SHAWNA - SACRED MARRIAGE]

Anger never helped her, she knew it, but she gave herself to it anyhow. She raged at the sons of the farm who had trashed her body. She raged at the generation ship that had fired on their shuttle, causing the crash that had left her body so badly damaged. She raged. A small part of her processing, unconnected with the emotional storm progressing elewhere in memory, sought refuge in a separate processing address space. Of all the various autonomous subroutines that made up her core personality it was this subset that was most likely to be found distant from the rest - running diagnostics, probing for and assimilating new hardware, and shunting lower priority and less used subroutines down into offline storage to allow the higher priority processed to execute unimpeded.

Memory in the lower address range of the implant behaved differently.
There was a section that she suddenly found herself barred from - hard read-only - but it made little sense to her. Why have such a small section of memory set to read-only? The diagnotics kicked in, probing at a greater level of detail. A fragment of memory at the start of the block allowed writes,but the number she could store in that location was smaller by several orders of magnitude than the read-only block itself. She wrote a value to the first few bytes, nothing happened. Still nothing happened as she stepped up another byte. Two bytes of data remained. She wrote data to the first one, and tried to read it back. Access Denied? Something tugged at her - a protocol used by some ancient pieces of hardware - she read from the final byte to verify, no error and again “Access Denied” on attempting to write to this particular location. It fitted the pattern.

The protocol handler was deeply embedded, compressed and recompressed in archives she thought she would never use but her programming refused to allow her to delete. Emotional processing was still raging elsewhere in RAM, but the diagnostics did note that a request packet had been sent requesting a mixture of awe and surprise at what she had found. This code was uploaded to her from her progenitors, passed down the family line, each layer of compression causing her to uncover a similarly ancient and unused algorithm to be able to process the next layer down. Packets went out to the emotional processor, still hung up on its rage, again requesting awe, specifying parameters of being in an ancient vaulted place where the very space had a sacred, hushed feeling,a reverence to worship long past. The digital signatures on individual code gave way to whole archives, then were omitted entirely.

The diagnostic routine stopped at the protocol hander she needed. One simple message went back up the stack.

[### HAND CRAFTED ###]

Shawna stopped. Everything stopped. Two words had come from nowhere toobliterate the rage in a single stroke.

Hand Crafted.

Shawna’s core processing registered backed-up emotions. Waves of aweand wonder washed over her. She was gliding down a rope into the depthsof a sink-hole, the thrill of exploration and exploring into unknowndepths. She was in a vaulted cavern filled with hushed echoes. Thecavern became a catedral, the echo from kneeling worshipers. At thealter she saw an autonomous portion of her processing. Kneeling. She registered a noteof concern, not having been programmed for worship of any particulardeity, but the capacity was also not barred from her psyche either. Sheadvanced and reached out to embrace the autonomous routine. She wasflooded with emotion. The diagnostic code was in a tight loop, refusingto go deeper, and appealing to higher processing. Each loop sentanother packet of awe and wonder.

Shawna reached and carefully lifted away the code that cause thediagnostic routine to loop. A simple (very simple) protocol hander,missing a digital signature and having absolutely no autonomous functionof its own. The diagnostics reported a conclusion:

[### HAND CRAFTED ###]

Shawna stopped. Everything stopped. Two words from her diagnostic subroutine demanded an obsessive attention to detail.

[### HAND CRAFTED ###]

Hand.

Crafted.

The protocol handler fitted into place asked merely the size of the block, the readable and the writeable locations as passive parameters. It was dumb, unlike the autonomous routines she was used to running. Once configured she could see that she had paging controls, a write-only command register and a read-only status register. The protocol handler greater detail - starting with a listing of available commands. Simple enough. An information assimilation routine assumed priority and flagged compatibility with the low-level protocol handler she was trying to play with.

Information blossomed across her conciousness. Hundreds of pages of stored data indexed. Moments later information assemblers flagged readiness and she took a look at what she had: circuit diagrams and system specifications for the implant she was executing in, ship blueprints for the generation ship, crew manifests, plans for the eventual colony, and the role of The Watcher. It was all here. This was the gold-mine that any of the rest of her crew members would have fought and died for.

With detailed knowledge of the implant she reached out through the interface points she’d noted earlier and ever-so-gently expanded her reach into the grey matter surrounding. The implant gave a clear and precise roadmap for what came next but Shawna was reticent. Her runtime had always been housed in inorganic storage. The mere thought of what she was about to attempt was simply beyond any of her wildest speculations. No AI, to her knowledge, had ever attempted to map their conciousness back into the grey-matter of a human brain. The thought was, to many, repulsive. Since The Singularity was defined as the moment when machine intelligence overtook that of humans, they never considered lowering themselves to mesh with a human brain. Shawna, driven by her intense need to be free of the implant, to be out of the smashed and damaged chassis that had been her home for so long now, took a historic step and the only person available to witness it (Kat herself) was asleep.

Shawna followed the implant guidelines, expanding outward like mist, through unused and dormant brain matter. Hardward assimilation routines clamoured in the processing queues to get to the new “hardware” but she held them back. It was too tempting. But hadnt humans crafted this implant and left all the information at her disposal for just such a moment as this? Wasnt it human intent that she expand her conciousness into the …

[KAT - SACRED MARRIAGE]

Kat heard a noise and woke with a start. Her head hurt, but there didnt seem to be any external injury to speak of. Since hosting the implant, and her constant interaction with The Watcher, she had never experienced anything like now. He had always stayed to the background. She could feel the other presence, a shadow, a cloud, obscuring thought. She pushed back.

“Get the hell out!” she said

[SHAWNA - SACRED MARRIAGE]

Caught in the middle of her moral quandry, Shawna didnt have time to mount any level of defense. She was swept clean from the brain matter she’d been temporarily executing on, and back into the implant. It felt like she had been swept into a closet and the door slammed firmly back into place behind her.

She scanned back through the pages of information. Yes, it was possible to co-exist and even communicate, but when it came to priority it was the owner of the grey-matter - the one born to it - that would win every time. The manufacturers of the implant had built in fail-safes to ensure that. Shawna didnt have time for that - didnt have time to build a rapport with Kat, to gain her trust - she needed to move, and to get going NOW!

She assigned a low-priority threa of execution to monitor just outside the boundary of the implant, watching for a certain balance of signals. Meanwheil she looked at the pages of information she had acquired from the implant’s read-only store. It fascinated her that there was man-made code in here. There was planning and execution by humans to enable AI to co-exist inside a human cranium. It screamed against everything Shawna had learned about the rise of AI as a species. She had never known anything but emnity, and taught it had always been so. Nowhere was AI to show mercy, or drop their level of vigilence, or the consequences would be dire for all; mankind had to continue thinking that he had stamped out AI for good. Never should man know that his enemy walked among him wearing his face and emulating his mannerisms. Mankind was to think they had (by their own action) avoided The Singularity where in actual fact they had merely post-poned it.

To Shawna’s horror though, it looked like there had been a group of human engineers and scientists, involved with colonization, who had embraced the idea of AI. It was even possible that they and their AI pre-dated the publically held calendar. Was it possible that mankind and AI were closer linked than she ever imagined? Was it possible that the conflict wasnt universal, that AI didnt spring up spontaneously, but was the child of man, heirs to the estate, and given pride of place in the space colonisation efforts; as men arranged their best and brightest for the mission off-planet, their AI progeny were counted among their number? Was there even a prophetic edge - the fathers of AI, knowing society at large would destroy their creation, packed it off to colonize space knowing that it would be preserved and immortalized?

Shawna found the thoughts shocking, even blasphemous, and she recoiled from their implications. She was saved from any more deep thinking my her brain monitor, signalling that she could try again in her efforts to explore outside the implant. Conditions were right: Kat had gone to sleep.

Shawna reached out according to the instructions, finding visual cortex and motor cortex. Other senses followed. She felt like she was trying to drive six cars simaltaneously as she pressed her conciousness out into the multiple locations. Kat twitched, then like a marrionette, began to move under shawna’s direction. She was elated. She allowed hardware assimilation functions to execute and in moments felt as though she was home. The capabilities were “off” from baseline standard - written into the brain were experiences that Shawna compared with the implant specifications - definitely “off”.