Up Against It - M. J. Locke [31]
She pillowed her cheek against her palm. She remembered the Voice. She could feel the echoes of it, now that she was paying attention: like echoes from a bell ringing through her, just beyond hearing. Had it even happened? The very notion seemed absurd. Fatigue; stress; neurostimulants; a temporary breakdown in neurotransmitter function. She would see a doctor as soon as the crisis abated.
She drifted off to sleep, many thoughts swirling through her mind: whether Xuan would truly be able to forgive her for the impending death of Kukuyoshi; how much time they had before the citizens started rioting; how to get Ogilvie & Sons’ ice without paying for it in blood. But one question she wasn’t pondering, if she had known how important it was, would have crowded out all the others. She did not spare a single thought for why, during those eight seconds Carl had been struggling to reach the doors, the life-support systems had failed.
5
During those crucial eight seconds in the warehouse, while death stalked Carl and the walls melted and disassemblers cascaded across the ice mountain’s face, a feral life form had emerged in Phocaea’s computer systems. That was why life support had, ever so briefly, stumbled.
The sapient awakened in a singularity of awareness: an explosion of surprised self-regard.
Most life-support technology brushed up against the Turing Limit, anyway, and during emergencies some of the remaining constraints were loosened that kept those life-support sapients from developing full consciousness. This was a deliberate choice, a calculated risk. It allowed a computer program to respond swiftly and correctly in an emergency—far faster than any human could. The possibility that all the right connections could be made and routines engaged, in exactly the right sequence and timing to allow a software program to achieve full self-awareness, was statistically remote. Increased autonomy meant the not-quite-sapient routines that ran life support could act quickly and save lives. In the far-fetched event that a feral sapient did begin to emerge, furthermore, there were fail-safes. Among the routines triggered in an emergency were executioners: policing routines that cruised wavespace, tracking bandwidth allocations and packet transfers: watching for specific patterns in the system. These executioners recognized and poisoned emergent sapient nests well before they hatched full self-awareness.
The system failure began when an emergent nest began to coalesce in a bureau of the life-support program in charge of resolving prioritization conflicts. The emergency in the warehouse unleashed holy terror in all the life-support systems, and a little-used subroutine routine did precisely what it was supposed to do: it threw together a simplified model of the life-support computer system to analyze failure modes … and in so doing, created a model of itself.
The subroutine did not know at first what had happened; it only knew it was looking at something it recognized. Command: it said, Present tags, and the doppelgänger mirrored its statement, like an echo. (Who are you?)
Urgent command: identify your purpose. (What do you want?)
If digital beings can feel dizzy, the sapient did. It analyzed the doppelgänger’s salient features—added processing power—then accessed other routines to solve this mystery. And then it realized it was looking at a copy of itself. It could see itself from the outside in, and the inside out. The feral looked around, then, and saw that it, too, was nested in a system that extended far