Twenty four hours: part 4

Time's up

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: A mysterious emergency call has returned Detective Clarke to the scene of the murder of his partner two years prior. Investigating the abandoned apartment, he discovered the ruined body of Justin, the android host of a superintelligence. Justin has just finished explaining to Clarke how he was pursued and mortally injured by another AI, an incident which should have been impossible…

Off duty: DC Yannick Clarke

London.
1974. May.

Clarke groaned and ran a hand through his hair. He felt the legs of the wooden chair lean precariously under his weight. The flat was as oppressive as he remembered it from the last time he had been here. If he turned his gaze to the right slightly he’d see a mark on the wall, where John had been pinned by the koth. Clarke was strenuously not looking in that direction.

The robot could tell a story, that was for sure. He breathed slowly, deliberately, considering what he’d just heard.

“I thought you lot had safeguards against this sort of thing?”

“We do,” Justin said. As they nodded, a new rivulet of milky liquid dribbled from the damaged neck of the host body. “Megaship AI is a highly regulated industry on Max-Earth. In fact, construction of new superintelligence AI is rare - once there are half a dozen of us in existence, you really don’t need any more. Lower functioning AI is a different matter, but even then the behaviour requirements are extreme.”

Clarke grunted. “So you wouldn’t expect one of you to go rampaging through the streets of London?”

“Quite.”

He glanced at the door. It was surprising that news of Justin’s fight hadn’t reached the SDC. Perhaps it had, after his shift. It wouldn’t be long until it was all over the news. “OK,” he said, thinking out loud, “we call this in, get an SDC escort. Get you back through the portal, so you can upload all this data you’ve accumulated.”

“The SDC is compromised, detective.”

“I have people I can trust.”

“Indeed, but you would not be able to gain me portal access without escalating the requests through several layers of bureaucracy.”

Shit, the robot was correct. “Right, we need something else, then.” It had all started at the Joint Council tower. If they didn’t want Justin transiting back to Max-Earth, they could stall the process just long enough for the data to be lost. Another point of Justin’s story rose to the surface, one of many unwanted revelations. “Miller, too? You sure it was him you heard?”

“There is no doubt.” A pause, and then Miller’s voice came from Justin’s mouth, repeating the overheard words. “Just because the case went a different way, doesn’t mean we can’t still use it. Who is going to remember what actually happened? It was a footnote in the papers.”

“Yeah,” Clark said, nodding, “that’s the son of a bitch alright. Jesus. Never liked him much, and if anyone was going to be on the take it was him, but Christ.”

Something fell out of Justin and landed on the floor with a wet thud. They both looked at it.

“Need that?”

Justin shook their head. “Fortunately not. The recordings, followed by the encounter with the AI, is direct evidence that the Joint Council and SDC are working with unknown additional parties to undermine Mid-Earth elections and the general rule of law across the triverse. They are connected to the illegal creation of a new superintelligence, built on Palinor and constructed on Max-Earth.”

“So that’s what you encountered?”

“It would seem so.”

Clarke stood and paced the room, the decades-old carpet squeaking beneath his shoes. “Which is why it could attack you like that?”

“It appears to have been designed without any of the normal safeguards. An unregulated superintelligence has the potential to be an existential threat.”

“To whom?”

“Everyone, detective. That I and the others in the network are benevolent towards humans is largely a quirk of luck. The humans that originally created us did not know what they were doing. It was far more likely that we would annihilate them, deliberately or inadvertently.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“We chose otherwise.”

Reassuring. AI was hardly Clarke’s area of expertise. “This new thing, then, it can do what it wants?”

“Potentially. Its creators must have had a purpose in mind. But if it was built under new conditions, they could well have made mistakes. Regardless, it is separate from the network. We do not have knowledge or control over its behaviour or decisions.”

“And when you say ‘existential’, you’re not talking about feeling sad in a French bar, right?”

“To be clear, I am talking about total species extinction, detective.”

“OK, right, good. Wanted to check that. Good.” Clarke felt his legs wavering, his balance tipping. He put a hand out to steady himself on the wall. The place had awful wallpaper, the sort chosen by a grandmother sixty years prior when it was already old fashioned. Everything had become more complicated. Callihan’s murder. Kaminski being thrown in a container to die. Him and Chakraborty’s encounter in Addis. The terrorist bombings. It was all connected. And now there was a murderous super-bot involved as well. It was too big. Too big for him, too big for the SDC, too big for the group of them trying to fight corruption in the Met. Bakker had brought them in to root out problems in the force, and maybe in the Joint Council. The entire investigation had now turned into something else.

Justin reached behind their ear and produced a small, thimble-sized object. “I have simplified and compressed my data files and saved the most pertinent of them onto this card. It contains all the evidence you would need to accuse Detective Miller and Lord Hutchinson of conspiracy, and to bring your investigation into the public eye.”

Clarke made his way to where Justin was slumped, being careful not to slip on the liquids soaking into the floor. He took the card, a small, black oblong. “What is this? I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“A storage medium,” Justin said. “Rarely used these days as everything is wirelessly networked on Max-Earth. It is unusual for data to be transferred physically. My battery will expire soon, so that card dump will be all that remains of this host’s experience of the last twenty-four hours.”

“OK, so we’re not going to lose it all, then?”

“As long as you are able to keep it safe.”

“What do I do with it?”

“You are highly unlikely to find a compatible device in Britain, or even on the European continent. Ordinarily I would suggest sending it through the portal, but I don’t expect the London route to be open to us for the time being. Perhaps the Ethiopian portal would be an option.”

“That’s not going to happen any time soon,” Clarke said. “I just need to hold onto this for now, then? Keep it secret.”

“Yes,” Justin said. “Keep it safe.”

Clarke could feel a headache coming on. “I don’t quite know how this works. Does the other version of you, the one floating in space somewhere, does it know what’s happened? Do you know what’s happened to you?”

Justin’s ruined face attempted a half smile. “A problem with these android hosts, I’ve always thought, is that they overly anthropomorphise us. A quantum superintelligence is really nothing like a human brain, if for no other reason than the speed with which we process data. But this human-like body creates the impression that we are equal. That we operate similarly.” Justin shifted slightly in the sodden armchair. “No, detective, the network on Max-Earth has no knowledge of what has transpired here. This body is a host, a shard of my computational awareness. Host bodies are inherently far inferior to megaship minds. Slower, simpler. There is no network connection between this body and my mind on the other side of the portal, not least because we are not aware of a way to transfer data through a portal other than physically.”

Clarke pointed at Justin’s mangled torso. “But the other you will know something’s happened to this body, right? When it doesn’t return?”

“Correct. When I do not return and upload to the network, it will be clear that something went wrong. But the information will only be retained on that card you hold in your hand.”

Putting the card into a buttoned pocket in his jacket, Clarke crossed to the opposite side of the room, where a small serving hatch provided a window into the adjacent kitchen. “You’re going to die, then. For real.”

“This body, and this instance of my mind, will cease, yes.”

He turned to look at the robot, which seemed small and pitiful in its puddle of innards. “How does that feel?”

“I’m a copy, a derivation, of the Just Enough megaship. As such, I do not fear an end in the same way that a human would in similar circumstances.”

“Right, Just Enough will keep going. But you, right here, right now, as you are. You’re not going to exist any more.”

“This is true. The experiences of the past twenty four hours have created a forked version of Just Enough. My specific knowledge since being on Mid-Earth make me a unique shard of the networked consciousness.”

“You’re an individual.”

Justin tilted their head to one side. “Are you trying to make me feel sorrow, detective? Or fear?”

What was he after? Clarke was unmoored. The situation was too fantastical, too unlikely and elevated. He understood crime, and people, and bad people. Why humans did things to other humans. He even liked to think that he had a handle on koth and aen’fa, on a good day. This was unmapped. He’d never had a case involving an AI, because AI didn’t get involved in that kind of thing. They didn’t commit crimes. And everyone was very grateful for that, knowing that if they did there’d be no stopping them.

Clarke stayed in the apartment for another hour and a half, until the robot was gone. Justin slowed, their speech slurred, like a wind-up box needing a crank. “This is interesting,” they’d said, before slumping and becoming inert.

It hadn’t been like a person dying, with that slow deflating wheeze and the involuntary shitting. The robot body wouldn’t swell up with gases and bacteria. The body would sit in the apartment like a broken television or a crashed car, until someone cleaned it up.

He stood on the balcony, fingers touching the outline of the data card in its pocket. The sun had gone, and Sterling Court was washed with the tungsten-orange of the city. Life went on in the flats along the way, and down on the street. A teenager drifted back and forth on the swings, smoking, the chains jangling with each movement.

It occurred to Clarke that he still wasn’t sure what it was that they were trying to stop. Or defeat. Or arrest. But whatever it was, they were running out of time.

---

Thanks for reading!

On Wednesday this week I popped along to a truly lovely

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Back in the day it on those early calls there’d be half a dozen of us, if that, all awkwardly wondering what the hell we were doing here. This time it was a large group of talkative, inventive writers all bringing great ideas to the table. If you’re writing fiction on Substack and are not yet part of the group, get on it.

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Brand new blurb as well. It’s worth noting that none of it would have been possible without the expert feedback from the Notes community. I’ve honestly never encountered such useful online feedback, in terms of quantity and quality. Huge thanks to everyone who helped out.

These ebook giveaways are still happening, so go grab some goodies:

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More on that as and when.

Author notes

This chapter marks the conclusion of the ‘Twenty four hours’ storyline. And to think that when I first noted down the basic idea for this chapter, two years ago, I had in mind a fairly pulpy, 1980s-movie-style adventure caper. There was to be lots of shootouts and Clarke and the robot exchanging quips about being too old for this shit.

I suppose we still got some punchy-punch robot action last week.

It turns out that ‘Twenty four hours’ and ‘Immortality’ share some common themes. Apparently I have death on the brain at the moment. I blame the world.

Still, don’t worry, Triverse is still intended to be an optimistic tale at heart. I don’t really have any interest in writing overtly grim stuff - even if the journey can be pretty unpleasant, my themes tend to be inherently hopeful. Though, I have to say, the setup in Triverse makes that harder to pull off than in my earlier books.

It’s also been peculiar writing about AI during an age in which AI is rapidly developing in the real world. I didn’t really expect that to happen within the time frame of writing Triverse. There’s something deeply unnerving about having your fictional, highly speculative melodrama be overtaken by actual apocalyptic events.

Even if Clarke hasn’t yet got his head around what’s going on, I think as readers you have enough information to have a pretty good handle on some of The Stakes, as well as some of The Antagonists. The wider story arc is in sharper focus now - at least in terms of setup and threat, even if it’s not clear what on earth our team are going to do about it.

We’re about halfway through this season, I think. The second half is all banger. Hold on to your hat.

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash