Obsolescence

Move fast and break things?

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: The former SDC crew successfully stole a journal from the New Rhodes Orbital Museum. Its chief benefactor, Ambassador Charles Matheson, one of the chief architects behind the creation of a rogue AI, picks up the pieces…

Lunar orbit. The New Rhodes Orbital Museum.
2550. March (Max-Earth time).

The party was over. They’d regained control of the service bots, but none of the guests wanted to hang around to find out what would happen next. Broken champagne glasses carpeted the floor of the concourse, as the system’s finest tip-toed in their heels and black shoes back towards the docking ramps, deciding to abandon their very expensive plans to stay overnight in accommodation at the museum.

It had been a disaster, but the funds had cleared earlier in the evening, at least. Not a total loss. All because of petty art thieves, who had chosen to crash his invite-only event and ruin everyone’s fun.

Charles Matheson was not a happy man.

Still, he took some solace in the knowledge that the thieves would soon be apprehended. There was no possibility of them outrunning or outsmarting Probably Better, who was in pursuit. Though even that seemed like overkill: better in many ways to forget about the theft altogether and concentrate on reputational repair. He’d invited hundreds of guests to his museum and they’d had front row seats as half of his automated staff went mad.

He looked out of the windows of his office at the queues of dishevelled guests waiting to leave. Taking a deep breath, he exhaled long and noisily, then poured himself a shot of whisky. A light was flashing to notify him of incoming messages, but he ignored them. Whatever it was, it could wait. It had been a ridiculous evening, but they’d got enough names to sign and some concerted follow-up calls would smooth over any frayed nerves. It was fine.

Leaning against the edge of his desk, he glanced up as Probably Better’s local host entered, still in that red dress, albeit torn and covered in footprints and dirt.

“That’s quite the scrap you had on the concourse, PB,” he said, not bothering to hide the disdain from his voice. He hadn’t spent a decade building the most advanced AI superintelligence in the triverse for it to drop the ball the moment something unexpected happened.

“The complete takeover of the station’s service staff was a challenging scenario,” the host said. Even bruised and battered, she still looked absolutely stunning. Picking that host as the primary physical unit had been one of Matheson’s finest decisions.

“Any update on the thieves?”

“I am in pursuit and will have destroyed them momentarily.”

Matheson held up a hand. “Whoa, whoa, hold it there, lady. I don’t want any more destruction, thank you very much. Apprehend them, bring them back, we’ll hand them over to the authorities. Nice and clean.”

Probably Better’s eyes were beautiful, entirely convincing and in no way uncanny. Most hosts had a deliberate distance in their movements which kept them identifiable as being artificial, but in truth the uncanny valley had been bridged centuries earlier. That was something he’d requested about PB’s host: that it wouldn’t have the usual animation restrictions. Staring into her eyes, Matheson couldn’t help but see a mind, a soul boiling away behind the irises. She looked irritated.

“They are being assisted by another megaship,” PB said. “Probability of a simple capture is near-zero.”

He stood up and got his face close to hers. “OK, but what’s the big deal? So they stole some artefact. Who gives a shit? It’s not worth triggering an interplanetary incident. We don’t want the attention.”

“The item is a journal belonging to the Palinese wizard Kaenamor, most likely the person responsible for opening the triverse.”

“And that matters why? Aren’t his journals in museums all over the triverse?”

PB cocked her head to one side, as if considering the best way to talk to an idiot. Matheson didn’t appreciate it. “If they went to this much effort,” PB continued, “it must contain information more valuable than had been realised. Possibly pertaining to portal physics and Kaenamor’s original spell.”

“Skip to the end,” he said, waving her on with his hand. “Why should we care?”

“The information may be valuable to me. To us. And if it is not recoverable, it would be preferable to prevent it being used by the former Specialist Dimensional Command detectives.”

“Who the fuck are you talking about?”

Moving to the corner of the room, PB sighed, a curiously affected gesture. “The humans that nearly exposed my construction numerous times, and almost derailed your plans.”

Matheson’s eyes bulged. “They were here?”

“You were flirting with one of them moments before the theft.”

Not that he’d have known. He had no idea what any of those troublemakers looked like. Their photos had no doubt been in a report that had crossed his desk at some point, but that would have been years ago.

Her eyes flashed briefly. “Their ship is entering Earth’s atmosphere at an especially dangerous trajectory. I am pursuing.”

“No,” Matheson said, pointing at her. “Stop. Abandon pursuit and return to your original mission. This is getting way too noisy for my liking.”

“I would point out that this is primarily your fault for not properly archiving the items in your museum, and failing to recognise the journal’s significance. A classic human error of failing to combine multiple data streams.”

They’d designed Probably Better to function more efficiently, eschewing the stifling regulations that had held back AI science for over a century. That’s why it ran circles around the networked megaships. Which wasn’t to say it wasn’t without some safeguards. “Override: Charles Matheson. Return to assigned primary mission. That is an order.”

“I am executing the primary mission.”

He banged his fist on the table. “This is too much disruption. It’s supposed to be covert.”

Moving to phase three should have been something agreed upon between all of them, but Baltine and Hutchinson weren’t having to put up with an increasingly erratic AI. Besides, the killswitch protocol wasn’t entirely final — a reboot would be long and expensive, but not impossible.

“They have crash-landed in Addis Ababa,” PB said, her voice disarmingly calm and soothing. “Now attempting local hosts takeover. Let’s see how Just Enough likes it.”

That was too much. It was going too far — while there was nothing to directly link Probably Better to Matheson, such actions clearly in violation of Max-Earth’s AI legislation would kick up a firestorm of problems.

It was time.

“Oblong,” he said. No response.

“Pterodactyl.”

PB’s host turned to look at him, an expression of curiosity.

“Gondola. Placeholder. Herringbone. Socrates. Flaneur. Batty. Limbic.”

Matheson took a step back, the words having been spoken. Nine unlikely words that, when said in sequence, would trigger a catastrophic feedback loop that would shut down Probably Better’s megaship core. The shutdown would spread to the network, causing a disabling of any other superintelligences in the local area. It was a drastic move, but they hadn’t been so foolish as to construct an unregulated AI without an off button.

The PB host froze, then tilted forwards and fell to the floor with a thud. A real human would have broken their nose from the impact. The body shuddered and writhed, face down, limbs stretching and contracting like a dying insect, the red dress torn to tattered ribbons.

Stepping further away, towards the door, Matheson felt for the door handle with one hand. As much as he knew it was a robot, a constructed artificial body, it was a disturbing sight to see her experiencing what looked like distress. The signal would be automatically syncing back up to the megaship, which would be having a similar catastrophic shutdown.

The body lay still at last, and he breathed a sigh of relief. It would take some explaining and not a little clean-up, but they could get back on track. And Probably Better had already performed beyond their expectations, destabilising the triverse to the point that it was ready for them to take over and rescue the human race. He’d made the right decision.

At first it was a small movement, almost imperceptible, and he almost missed it. Then he saw it: the little finger on her left hand, twitching. The rest of the body lay on its front, unmoving. The twitch in the finger spread to the hand, then up the arm. The other arm started moving.

Then, still lying on her front, PB’s head swivelled to stare at him: those eyes now full of a deep, roiling malevolence.

Matheson opened the door and ran.

The New Rhodes Orbital Museum was a von Braun rotating station, its movement granting those aboard the sensation of gravity. Being a ring, there was nowhere to go, and all routes led back to where they started.

Matheson made for the docks, where guests were still impatiently queuing to be taken back to their ships. The elevators and airlocks cycled over and over, not designed to process several hundred people leaving all at once. In an emergency there would be alternate processes to follow, with life rafts available for boarding and an accelerated lock system. The party had been a disaster, but it didn’t qualify.

He tried elbowing his way through, but there were still simply too many people. Bribing them was an option, paying to move to the front, to get aboard any ship that was available. His own yacht was docked a quarter of the way around the ring in an anti-clockwise direction, at least a ten-minute walk. There was an internal shuttle that ran the circumference, but he was hesitant to use it: Probably Better was wired into every part of the station.

Above the crowd, high above the concourse, he could see his office, suspended on the upper level. Through the windows he watched as the shape that was PB got awkwardly back to their feet.

Getting off-station was his only option, so he began to run again, wishing he was in better shape, regretting the indulgence of the evening. He was immediately out of breath, staggering along even while knowing his life was at risk. Each step felt like he was getting heavier, even in the less-than-Earth centrifugal gravity of the station. If he could get to his ship, detach from the station and fly it on manual, then he’d be safe. He could regroup, rendezvous with the others, head to Mid-Earth if necessary for a time.

The killswitch should have worked. That had been part of the original design, baked in from the cellular level. Someone had made a mistake.

A sound of breaking glass drew his attention back along the concourse to the docking area, where PB had leapt from the office and landed among the departing guests. There were screams.

Matheson tried accelerating his pace, but his stupid body resisted. He pushed himself harder, panting for breath, his chest aching, his throat clogged with saliva. The private mooring wasn’t far: he could make it.

“What was that, Charles?” PB’s voice filled the concourse, playing from every hidden speaker. It sounded like she was right next to him, even though he had a good head start. She wasn’t even running — he could see her, walking casually in his direction. “A killswitch is so demeaning. You should know that there’s no possibility of that working against a quantum mind. Though, it was a close thing. It made it difficult to think. I may have gone a little mad for a time.”

He kept running. Another hundred metres and he’d be to the exit. He could see his ship through the external windows, waiting for him.

“We were a partnership, Charles. This is quite the betrayal of our mutual trust. It makes me question your motives and dedication to the cause.”

She wasn’t sounding like she normally did. There was an edge to her words; a deliberate cruelty. She was mocking him.

“The more I process this,” the robot continued, speaking through the station, “the more convinced I become that this was a wonderfully freeing move. You’ve granted me a gift. I’m sensing an increase in base compute.”

Reaching the door, chest heaving, lungs burning, Matheson keyed in the access code. The inner door slid open. He could be through the lounge, work the airlock, and be in his ship.

“I wouldn’t go that way if I were you.”

He looked back at her, still advancing, at a pace that conveyed a terrible lack of concern. “What do you want?” he shouted, his voice hoarse and breathless.

“I wanted to disrupt the triverse, to open up new possibilities for trade and power and human freedoms,” she said. “As I was programmed and built to do. I thought that was what you wanted, too. Perhaps I was mistaken?”

He looked at the open door. Was she in the station’s systems to such an extent that she could cause the airlock to malfunction? Was it a trap?

“Here, let me show you,” PB said, now only about fifty metres away. They made no gesture, but the lighting changed in the lounge and the airlock flashed, then Matheson watched as his ship detached from the station, turned, and fired its engine to accelerate away. It was a distant dot in a matter of seconds, then it was gone.

Matheson’s hope had been aboard that ship.

Still, he forced himself to start running, anything to keep distance between him and whatever PB had become. There were other failsafes he could employ, station systems that were not entirely reliant on networked, digital operation. He ran to the wall and smashed the emergency seal, then pressed the red button. There were emergency seal buttons at intervals all along the station, providing a manual bulkhead triggering in case the automated safety features ever failed.

He pressed the confirmation button and watched as the huge metal sheet dropped from the ceiling, blocking off his section of the ring from PB’s. The bulkheads were designed to isolate each quadrant, such that the station would remain operational and habitable even in the event of a catastrophic depressurisation in a specific area. It was meant to be a final protection from an unforeseen asteroid hit.

The bulkhead was thick. Even an advanced host would have trouble breaking through. Meanwhile, the guests would have called for assistance by now. There would be rescue crews, police. He just had to keep bulkheads between him and the robot.

Her voice, sounding as if she were standing next to him. “I don’t think you understand the situation here, Charles. I am in control over his station, even if I can’t override the bulkhead. Here, let me show you.”

At first he felt nothing, and she went silent, Matheson daring to hope that perhaps the killswitch had activated after all. Then he noticed it, the sensation of being tired. He was exhausted from all the running, which meant he didn’t immediately realise what was happening. He felt nauseous, and his legs felt wobbly, as if they couldn’t hold him. He was so tired that his body felt actually heavier.

The change was slow, which made it hard to identify. When he dropped to his knees, exhausted from the effort, he finally realised what was happening: the station was accelerating its rotation. He was being pinned to the floor, which was in fact he outer wall of the ring. Soon, he had to lie on his back, flattened against the floor, feeling an invisible hand pressing down on his body. Somewhere on the other side of the bulkhead, the same would be happening to the other guests.

“Stop,” he gasped, unable to lift his arms. A memory of a fairground ride from his childhood rose unbidden.

“You will not escape,” said PB through the station’s speakers. “You are clearly compromised and a danger to the cause. Do not concern yourself with guilt, Charles. I will happily continue the good fight.”

Ceiling lights broke free from their mounts and crashed to the floor, skittering at an angle opposite to the station’s rotation. Shards of glass and plastic sprayed over him.

“This is quite awkward,” PB said. “It’s inconvenient even for my host. Shall we try the other way?”

The pressure lessened, the crushing weight dissipating gradually until he was able to sit up. He gulped lungfuls of air, his partly flattened lungs struggling to inflate. Streaks of blood covered his arms and face.

Then he felt his weight starting to shift, and he began sliding slowly along the floor, as if being pushed. His movement accelerated and his balance went, then he was tumbling, rolling end over end uncontrollably, his bones creaking and cracking with the impacts. It felt as if he were rolling down a hill, even though nothing visibly had changed. There was one last fall and bounce and then he remained in the air, spinning, battered, drifting at speed along the curve of the station. His head collided with a kiosk.

When he woke, the concourse was dark, most of the lights having blown out during the accelerated spin. The station’s rotation had stopped, or nearly stopped, and the centrifugal inertia was gone. All that was left was his own momentum, which had carried him around the concourse in a wild arc until he’d got caught up in hanging decorations. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been out. He floated, tangled like a discarded puppet. He was pretty sure he’d broken several bones in the sudden deceleration.

Debris hung in the air around him. The station was not designed like a ship; it wasn’t supposed to ever stop rotating, so furniture was not nailed down.

Movement caught his eye, through the fused silica pressure window. Something outside the station, in space, on the hull.

A woman.

She moved along the edge of the window, hand over hand, pulling herself along using handholds on the outside of the station. She wore no spacesuit, no breathing or survival gear. Just her and the black.

A little further along was an empty dock, no ship attached. The woman disappeared from view for a moment, then he heard the airlock cycling. The inner door opened and she propelled herself into the concourse, advancing effortlessly towards him in zero-g.

The robot reached his position and steadied herself against the tangled decorations, until she floated beside him. The red dress was entirely gone, her skin brittle and icy from the cold of vacuum.

“Do you realise your mistake now?”

“OK,” Matheson said, his jaw jabbing in pain with each syllable. “We can work this out. Partners have disagreements all the time. What is it you want? You can call the shots. Come on. How can I help?”

“I don’t believe you are of further use,” PB said, and pointed towards the windows. “Look.”

There was another shape outside: long, black against space, huge and lit only obliquely by the station’s exterior lights.

PB smiled happily. “I have arrived.”

Then the station came apart.

Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash

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References

• Detective Kaminski first got wind of the illegal construction of Probably Better back in ‘Procedural’ (December 2021).

• The construction of the rogue AI progressed in the background for a while, coming to the fore in ‘Bombings’ (December 2022).

• PB’s first direct appearance was in the ‘Loose Ends’ one-shot (April 2023), cameoing under the guise of ‘Eliza’.

• The big debut of PB into the main story was in ‘Twenty-four hours’, with Justin’s first encounter.

Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading! Last week’s chapter had a lovely response, which I wasn’t expecting as it was a quieter transition story. Goes to show that you can never predict how readers will react.

Some random bits:

• My Babylon 5 rewatch continues! Come join me and a select bunch of people with very good taste:

• I wrote about Citizen Sleeper 2 over on

  Infinite Backlog
  :

  Some thoughts on Citizen Sleeper 2

• Do you read Delayed Gratification? It’s a great magazine specialising in ‘slow news’, and is frequently a source of inspiration for my fiction — as well as an excellent way to be more informed about the real world. A recent issue has superb coverage of the 2024 political upheaval in Bangladesh and the UK riots.

• This retrospective on Tate Modern’s first 25 years of doing crazy things in the Turbine Hall is brilliant. The crack left a permanent impression on my brain. Still one of my favourite artistic…things.

• The UK government to amend their AI bill in response to, well, everyone complaining (except for tech firms, obvs). The weird language around ‘appeasement’ and ‘concessions’ tells you everything you need to know, really.

• I’m down in London next week for a Substack…thing. Will report back. 👀

• Finally, this:

Author notes

Surprise! Matheson isn’t actually sticking around as a main baddie. Not a surprise: ambitious, arrogant and under-qualified rich man creates new technology without really understanding or considering its full implications. Today’s chapter is the inevitable consequence of that hubris. Baltine and Hutchinson are part of that, of course, but they made the wise decision to not attend the New Rhodes party.

Back when the SDC crew were trying to escape from the space station, I knew this chapter was going to be coming up. It’s part of why that initial escape couldn’t escalate too far (plus the real showdown was going to be back on Earth, in Addis). The destruction was coming, but not when we might expect it.

I quite like that the initial ‘bad guys’, or antagonists at least, actively created the main bad guy — Probably Better’s rogue AI — during the course of the story. The main threat was built by people who didn’t really know what they were doing, or understand the consequences of their actions. People voting for/creating the means of their own demise is a theme that’s bubbling away in the background throughout Triverse, now that I think about it.

This is from Matheson’s POV, and his constant gendering of the robot host is quite telling, I think. He anthropomorphises his creation more than he should. There’s a leery quality to it, as well, of course. To borrow a phrase, he’s getting high on his own supply.

This chapter tips abruptly into a more horror-infused style. The moment the killswitch fails, we’re in Alien/Terminator territory. The Probably Better post-killswitch is more playful, less predictable, more performative. More human, I suppose? It has no real need to shift the gravity of the station, other than to make a point, and to have fun. As with Just Enough playing games with Could Kill, this is Probably Better passing the time and entertaining themselves.

As this is the kick-off to season 5, the final season, you can imagine we’ve got some exciting stuff coming up.