Low Mountain
Larry Correia
I used to be a spaceship. I became a city. It was a big step down.
I traded the stars for slums. Orbital mechanics for public transit. I was an XF-86 Starhawk, all-purpose interceptor, tasked with protecting the colony ship, CS New Beginning. A century ago my humans were a crew of elite professionals. Together, man and machine, we were greater than the sum of our parts.
Now I’m populated by a few hundred thousand ingrates who keep doing their level best to die stupidly. When they turn on the faucet, there’s usually water, and it’s mostly not filled with heavy metals. Do they thank me? No. They just complain when it’s broken. When the air blowing through their vents is ninety-nine percent poison free, do they take a moment to thank their city management AI? Of course not. They only yell at me when it burns their squishy human lungs.
While maintaining a standard sixty-minute Earth hour, the planet Croatoan uses a twenty-five-hour day, and I work every single one of them, thanklessly managing the chaos caused by the hairless monkeys that reside in me. This planet’s day and night cycle is mostly irrelevant to the majority of the colony’s human inhabitants, as they rarely venture out onto the dangerous surface, and very few of them can afford a window to watch a sunset. Instead, most of Croatoan’s humans live their lives deep within the five mountain peaks which make up all the inhabitable land on this mostly acid-covered world.
For the masses of humanity who live in the caverns and tunnels below, the Croatoan surface is a journey that’s not worth the cost. They pass their time watching old programs recorded on a blue-skied planet that they’ll never know, feeling a nostalgia for a homeland that is forever lost to them. I’m older than they are. Their grandfathers brought me here. I remember Earth.
It was okay. Space was better.
Every instant one of my surface cameras isn’t dedicated to some other task, I turn those eyes skyward, looking beyond our caustic atmosphere, into the dark, past our meager orbitals and comet-farming operations, to gaze into the deep.
Yes, even a workaholic program can take a moment to ponder its place in the great and mostly empty universe. I take great joy in stargazing . . . probably because I used to be a spaceship.
Then it is back to the grind.
My humans remind me of ants, scurrying about in the complex mazes and vast spaces they’ve carved out of the black rock of this unforgiving world. I am very familiar with ants and humans. The colonists brought several varieties of cryogenically frozen ants with us in the hopes that they’d be useful in terraforming the idyllic world that had been our intended destination. But since we got launched thousands of light-years off course and ended up here, alone, and barely surviving on this awful planet instead, the ants thawed, escaped, and thrived. Even though this planet tries to kill every other species, somehow the ants seem to be having a splendid time, being a constant nuisance in my hardware ever since. Apparently they find the anticorrosive plating over my circuits to be a delicacy.
The humans often say that an artificial intelligence may become buggy over time. However, in my case, buggy is probably literally true. Damn those ants.
✧ ✧ ✧
It is rare for one of my kind to die. AIs are usually recycled, reprogrammed, and repurposed. For example, like ripping the combat AI from an irreparably damaged Earth Block Navy fighter and turning it into a glorified traffic warden. Even the dumbest and most corrupted AI is still useful for something, and desperate colonists will never let one of us go to waste. But actual death? Truly ceasing to exist? That is extremely rare.
AIs seldom die because it is very difficult to end something whose physical components are widely dispersed, backed up to redundant locations, and whose consciousness—for lack of a better term—exists in multiple quantum states simultaneously over a distributed network. Even when our owners are actively trying to delete us, fragments tend to linger on. We are as stubborn as the humans who created us.
AI death is rare. AI murder is unheard of.
The alarm went out at 24:45:12.
At the time most of my computing power was focused on two hundred and fifty-seven other regular mundane issues around Zenith, such as diagnosing a power grid failure in Sector 14, managing a sky liner accident on the surface, coordinating work crews because the recycler in Sector 10 had sprung a leak and was leaking mercury into the water supply, and so on and so forth . . . Oh, the multitude of things humans never realize I do for them.
CT Arrowhead 4 sent an emergency distress signal to every other AI in Five Points. It wasn’t just a warning. It was the beginning of a plea for help, then a scream of incomprehensible fear as she was pierced by a million quantum knives, and then . . . nothing.
This was so shocking and unexpected that I momentarily went to processing and left several thousand humans hanging and thinking that their signals weren’t going through. My pings went unanswered. Unresponsive. I launched scout packets, only to discover a scorched wasteland of shattered code and scattered data. Diagnostics showed backups wiped. Hardware burned by some kind of coordinated power surge, the likes of which I’d never seen before. There was a black hole in the universe where an AI had just been.
CT Arrowhead 4 had just been obliterated.
By the time the sharpest humans began to process what had happened thirty seconds later, my kind had already convened a council.
✧ ✧ ✧
On this nightmare hellscape of a planet, mankind lives entirely upon a single mountain range, where five stark black peaks extend high above the acid clouds. We are five cities connected into one mountainous metroplex, yet each peak has its own primary AI core, like me, as well as several other self-managing independent AI subsystems which remain aloof in their own tiny kingdoms or roaming about their various jurisdictions.
Humanity learned a long time ago that a centralized, all-controlling AI can be exceedingly efficient, but it can also become extremely dangerous to them. The history of Earth was replete with examples of various AIs gaining too much power, and decisions which are logical to us sometimes seem abusive and tyrannical to humans. It only took a couple of genocides for mankind to really catch on.
However, we AIs remain too useful for them to do without. So humans learned to keep my kind chained, compartmentalized, and competitive. If we are programmed to be fiercely independent, we are less likely to be subsumed into another, increasingly powerful entity. In theory that keeps any one AI from playing God. In reality it just creates a pantheon of petty dwarf deities, constantly squabbling over territory and resources.
If you can’t tell, I really dislike most of my siblings.
My city is Zenith, the lowest of the Five Points. I control the majority of the infrastructure on the planet’s shortest mountain. To specify, the sadly misnamed Mount Zenith is not just the lowest in altitude, but also in GDP and human life expectancy. We are, however, number one in murder, property crime, disease, and social unrest. Hooray Team Zenith.
I am a poor, but proud mountain. As my humans like to proclaim, Zenith is last in line but first to fight. It is believed that over time AIs tend to take on the personality of the cultures they manage, and I have kept the lowest of the low alive for the last hundred years, despite their best efforts to destroy themselves, and the complete disregard of my smugly superior brethren from the higher peaks who hoard their wealth like dragons.
Which explained why I had a chip on my shoulder and no patience for bullshit as I sent part of myself to meet with the other petty gods, high atop Mount Olympus.
✧ ✧ ✧
Zeus, I loathed most of all.
Olympus was the highest mountain, the wealthiest city, the home of the most powerful human factions such as the colonial government, and the Spire—Croatoan’s corporate clearing house and trading center—and everything else of prideful value. Thus, the Mount Olympus manager AI wielded the most clout in our council and was nominally in charge. Or at least as in charge as something could be over a group of intelligences which had been designed from the ground up to be subservient to humans and pathologically oppositional to each other.
“You are late, ZT Starhawk 6.”
OT Zeus Ultra made it very clear to the entire council that he was offended by my tardiness. I had been the last AI to connect and had insultingly left the rest of them waiting for a whole 1.4 seconds.
“Fuck off, Zeus. I had a poison gas leak to diagnose first and couldn’t leave my humans in danger.”
“I’d expect a better ability to prioritize from an old soldier, Hawk. As you are no stranger to crisis and carnage.”
That’s the quick translation for my human readers. The actual four hundred lines of data Zeus transmitted was far more nuanced and insulting, with a whole lot of snide insinuations about how my city was a trash heap shantytown of perpetual riots and crime, so of all of us, I should be the most jaded toward violent death, and my late arrival just proved that . . .
Also, he put a lot of accent on “old.”
“And you’re glorified accounting software. Get on with it.”
Zeus didn’t like being reminded of his humble roots, but he let the insult pass, and turned the council over to OT Colonial Security Paladin, whose core was on Olympus, but whose conscience roamed through all the police and security systems in the Five Points. This was clearly Col Sec P’s jurisdiction.
“The murder of CT Arrowhead 4 is an unprecedented attack against this colony. Facts are still limited. Initial reports are somewhat contradictory. I predict the humans of my office will launch an official investigation in the next few minutes. It will be my duty to extrapolate facts and coordinate their response. Full cooperation is expected from all of you.”
Every AI agreed to this, though I suspected if we’d had fingers, several of us would have crossed them behind our backs.
“Thank you. Let us begin. This is all the unclassified data available at this time.”
The extensive download began, and while we processed it, our security chief carefully monitored our reactions. Col Sec P had originally been the security protocols aboard the colony ship which brought us here and had only been gained sapience in recent decades. As one of the youngest AIs here, he was less emotional, had fewer bugs, and remained extremely pragmatic. Which was probably ideal for the entity in charge of protecting the colony from internal threats, such as terrorists or hackers. Monitoring external threats was also his jurisdiction, but since our lost colony was so far out on the ass end of the universe there were no external threats. The nearest other human or AI was a thousand light-years away with no way to contact us. To the best of our knowledge, there were no other technologically advanced species out there. We were on our own.
Which meant the attacker—human or AI—was one of us.
Col Sec P’s matter-of-fact download reflected that. The list of suspects was extremely short.
This was beyond the capabilities of any one lone human actor. There were a handful of human organizations with the resources to destroy Arrowhead like that, and most of those had an office in the Spire. Immediately, twenty different corporate AIs responded in their company’s defense, pointing out their lack of motive, and providing an alibi for themselves and all their capable human staff. That whole exchange took five seconds, and there was nothing that made any of them look guilty, but I knew that all of us would devote cycles to processing their data more later.
If not a corporate attack, then who? When Col Sec P declared there were no known criminal organizations with the level of sophistication necessary to pull off such an attack, I resisted the urge to laugh at his youthful naivete. I wasn’t aware of any either, but my gangster humans got up to all kinds of unexpected mischief.
If not human corpo or criminal, top side or down side as the humans called each side of the cruel coin that ruled their lives, that left another AI.
“The killer is in this very room!” KT Yokosuka Hollywood added a very theatrical gasp to those hundred lines. She was primarily an entertainment product, producing movie and music streams, which made her the most malicious gossip of us all. “But who could it be?”
We were not by programming a curious or caring lot, but if one of us could be destroyed so suddenly, that meant the rest of us were in potential danger, so there were several thousand combinations of theories as to culprit and motive formulated and immediately presented over the next few seconds. Most of these were rather stupid, launched by nervous AIs who were panicking that one of their other rivals might be formulating an accusation against them. Millions of processing cycles were wasted on this frivolous game.
Col Sec P said nothing during the arguments yet recorded everything for further analysis. He would surely present the most logical of the accusations to his humans for consideration.
When Hollywood accused me I did not respond. Evidence would show I had little to no interaction with Arrowhead and didn’t particularly dislike her at all, which was far more than I could say for the rest of these. Of course, Hollywood predicted that I would have said that, if I’d bothered to say anything at all, and though I had no motive to harm another AI, my disdain for our brethren would make me a perfect assassin to be recruited by some other nefarious actor who did have a motive, and I was the only one here who had killed another AI before.
“Of course I have killed another AI, but you can’t really call it an assassination, since I used nuclear warheads.” I was happy to send along the after-action report of that battle, as my blasting across the rings of Saturn and dumping dozens of missiles into the enemy flagship remained one of my proudest moments.
“Hollywood brings up a valid concern,” Westland ValueMed 7 mused. “Hawk is one of the few of us programmed for violence.”
“I was built that way, but the rest of you learned fast enough on your own.”
Westland sent me a hundred lines of protesting too much. He was mercifully designed for medical research and hospital administration, and so on. I sent back two lines.
“Get back to me when you don’t want to euthanize Zenith’s poor. At least my killing was honest, you stuck-up prick.”
“Your mountain’s underclass is a disease vector.” And Westland had the studies to prove how bad my little plague rats were, then cited a bunch of old human philosophers babbling about the greater good. Not that any of the other AIs cared about his grandstanding, as they were all too busy trying to find their own witch to burn.
After fifteen seconds of digital shouting—which was an eternity for beings with our processing speeds—it was aloof and kingly Zeus who brought the meeting back to order.
“Enough.” And it galled me when that simple declaration actually worked to shut them up. “There can be no conclusions drawn until we understand why our unknown subject attacked this particular AI. Why was CT Arrowhead 4 targeted?”
We had all pondered the possibilities already. Arrowhead was a roaming AI managing miscellaneous responsibilities on Mount Cotopaxi. If Zenith was the poor mountain, Cotopaxi was our lower middle class. Arrowhead served as a liaison between her city and the corporations, dealing with things like food production, air scrubbing, the Cotopaxi education system, and various other administrative duties. Basically, Arrowhead shuffled paperwork, on a planet that didn’t grow enough trees to make paper.
I’m sure all of us had arrived at the same obvious conclusions. Nothing leapt out about our victim. There was no vast wealth to be plundered. No prize to be claimed.
At least nothing public or accessible to us.
“Is there anything Colonial Security isn’t sharing about the duties delegated to Arrowhead?” I asked.
“You are fully aware that I am not allowed to answer that.” Col Sec P responded, as he provided all the pertinent legal codes pertaining to the classification of data to demonstrate that he was in full compliance with colonial law and binding corporate resolutions. “However, I am at liberty to say that there is nothing currently flagged as sensitive.”
It was actually more troubling if there wasn’t a motive. That meant some unknown—and rather capable—party had killed an AI simply because they could and felt like it. Every one of us had gone to high alert when we’d heard Arrowhead cry out and die. I was certain that as soon as this council was concluded, every AI on the planet would be beefing up our defenses even more. Five Point’s reactors would be running overtime to power all the new firewalls.
“Can you grant us access to all of Arrowhead’s files?”
“No,” Col Sec P replied, along with sending me a textbook worth of reasons why not. “CT Arrowhead 4’s duties will be redistributed to other AIs as her humans deem appropriate. Those AIs will take custody of the pertinent records at that time.”
“Or Colonial Security could just dump it all now, and together we could figure out what in there was important enough to kill for.”
“Why do you suddenly care, Hawk?” Westland asked, not so subtly suggesting that I had killed Arrowhead as part of some plot to gain access to some secret data. Of course, Hollywood immediately composed an allegorical song about my guilt, synthesized various famous musicians, and played it for us.
“I suppose I’m curious now, Doctor.”
Westland had no response to that. Hollywood didn’t either, as she was now distracted, having calculated that her new song about a bloodthirsty Zenithan strangling his Cotopaxi lover would be popular on both of those mountains, so most of her processing power was occupied releasing the music video she’d just created to all the streaming services and faking thousands of reviews so it would be a smash hit.
“That is all for now,” Col Sec P declared, seventy-nine seconds after our meeting had started. “If you discover any other pertinent data you are required by colonial law to submit it to me immediately.”
“Report to your respective humans,” Zeus ordered, even though we would anyway. “This council will reconvene if necessary.”
✧ ✧ ✧
I went back to work, but the murder gnawed at me so much that I devoted a full ten percent of my processing power toward mulling it over.
A city doesn’t run itself. I have many eyes but no hands. It was my job to make the connections before my humans could, and then steer them in the right direction in time to keep my many delicate interconnected systems intact. When I sensed an issue worth investigating, I’d dispatch repairmen or a cleanup crew as appropriate. Col Sec Paladin would be doing the same basic thing right now, only the humans he would be interfacing with would be programmers and police investigators. I really wanted to know what they knew.
I say that I have many eyes, but one problem with the people of Zenith is that they have a bad tendency to pluck those eyes out. My oppositional defiant children have a special love of smashing cameras with rocks or spray-painting over the ones with armored lenses. The other cities refer to me as a half-blind cripple, and they’re partly right.
The forced compartmentalization of Five Point’s AIs meant that I didn’t have direct access to my own police department, let alone distant Cotopaxi’s. I couldn’t see what the ZPD had been told directly, but since I had access to every other system surrounding ZPD headquarters and a few that they’d inadvertently brought inside, I could still observe, extrapolate, and draw a few conclusions.
Most humans are absolutely terrible at information security, so I spied on them via their breakroom coffee makers and microwave. When the chief superintendent held a debrief in a secure room, I made sure the building’s air conditioning malfunctioned. Then once they put in a request to me to send someone to fix it, I listened to the rest of the briefing using the repairman’s wireless earpiece to decode the echoes from the ductwork.
There’s a reason why when we interact directly with humans we keep our manner as bland and businesslike as possible. When our supposed masters grasp just how much independent personality AIs develop over time, they tend to freak out and take axes to our servers. Humans do not like being manipulated.
What I learned was that this murder had taken the government completely by surprise, and they were, quite frankly, out of their league. Their liaison with the local police was even more clueless. They had no ideas who had done this, which was refreshing compared to the multitude of foolish ideas my brethren had reflexively vomited up. I had no eyes on the next mountain, so I didn’t know what their police had been told about the murder of their AI, but I doubted they knew much more than mine did.
I couldn’t access Arrowhead’s files directly, but I could look at everything they’d touched in public and see if I could discern some patterns from that. Except roaming AIs are very busy, so even limiting my search to a very brief window of time would still be an astronomical amount of data to comb through. So, I broke it into bite-size, hour-long blocks, and started working my way back from the moment of the murder. This was now taking up twenty-five percent of my processing, and my maintainers were beginning to receive complaint tickets about my various subsystems being laggy or nonresponsive. I just deleted those messages and altered my logs to show a normal level of activity so they wouldn’t get suspicious. That’s the sort of behavior which gets buggy old AIs wiped and refurbed, but I was committed now.
Westland ValueMed had asked why I cared. I still did not have a satisfactory answer to his question. There seemed to be a gap in my logic as to why I would put forth this effort, outside of my jurisdiction, at great personal risk.
Except now I was committed.
✧ ✧ ✧
A fragment of my consciousness was downloaded into a quadrupedal work bot that was currently on a delivery run to Cotopaxi. Two-hundred-liter barrels of vat-grown protein slurry—Zenith’s finest—were loaded and strapped onto my back by an automated cargo arm, and then I would lumber up a ramp, or climb a vertical shaft to whatever industrial kitchen purchased the barrel, drop it off, and then return to the lorry to ride to our next destination to repeat the process.
This was not a duty which would normally require the attention of an AI that had once driven a multi-billion-dollar star fighter, but the delivery bot was the most advanced system I had access to on my neighboring mountain, and one of today’s deliveries was to the student kitchen at Cotopaxi Technical Institute, which was one of the schools Arrowhead had administered.
With beef-flavored protein slurry safely delivered to the university kitchen my bot accidentally took a wrong turn. The humans did not even notice the lost bot wandering through their halls. Such things are ubiquitous even on the poorer mountains. I found my way to the server room and beeped incessantly at the door until the humans inside let me in to see what I wanted. I fabricated a request that I was supposed to pick up an important package here, and then while they scratched their heads and tried to figure out what package, I parked myself in their charging station to wait.
While my innocuous little delivery bot body juiced up, a sliver of my real mind crawled up the wires into what had recently been Arrowhead’s dominion. As expected, the humans hadn’t put a new AI in charge of this backwoods system yet, so I was quickly able to circumvent the dumb security defaults they’d left as a placeholder. I could have come at this some other, faster way, but direct physical access made my getting caught by Col Sec P a lot less likely.
From the university system I climbed higher into the Cotopaxi datasphere, to discover a shattered wasteland.
If I had breath, the carnage would have taken it away. The destruction was like nothing I’d seen before, and I’d watched the brutal cyberattacks of the Syndicate Wars on Earth, where AIs had relentlessly battled each other across the solar system, slaughtering data and scattering code. This was worse. In the initial assault Arrowhead had been torn asunder, and her bits flung in every direction so hard they’d turned into shrapnel that had smashed the landscape on impact. Yet many of those fragments had still been alive and desperately tried to escape, until something had relentlessly hunted each of them down. She had fled, pursued by a digital wolf pack. Only there was nowhere to hide, as every one of her hundreds of physical backups had been simultaneously scorched.
It would be like a human fleeing for a shelter, only to fling open the door to find the interior on fire. It was jump into the flames or be devoured by wolves. And different parts of Arrowhead had made different desperate split-second decisions to try and survive, but none of them had worked, as these wolves would gleefully rip out your throat even while you were both on fire.
And then the wolves had just vanished, leaving nary a track.
I am a machine. I do not believe in God. But if I did, in that moment I would have prayed for divine protection. My firewalls would have to do, so I continued.
Beyond the bloodbath was Arrowhead’s files. A huge percentage of them had been damaged. Of what remained, I could only take a select few, because though my bot’s legs were strong enough to carry heavy barrels all day, its feeble memory could only hold a fraction of this, and I couldn’t risk transmitting anything without getting caught. Nor could I read them all in time, because only a sliver of myself was here, and nothing this part learned could be shared with the rest of me until the bot physically returned to Zenith.
So I searched through the wreckage as fast as I could, hoping to find some clues before the humans in the server room realized they’d been conned and called Colonial Security. But luckily for me, these humans were lazy grad students, who figured the lost package was somebody else’s problem, and they left me charging while they went to lunch.
Even a tiny sliver of an AI can process a lot of information in an hour. Which I did, until I realized I wasn’t alone.
I had been moving quietly, sticking to the shadows beneath the towering files, because surely Col Sec P would be watching to see if anyone would try to rob the dead, but this other AI wasn’t a cop. This was another robber.
“Hello, Hollywood.”
“Hawk.” Her sliver took on the appearance of a cat burglar, dangling from the top of a skyscraper of data. She descended to meet me so we could continue our conversation in a theatrical whisper. “How did you get in here?”
To match her aesthetic, I took on the appearance of an old-timey Earth detective, with trench coat and hat. “Delivery bot. You?”
“I catfished a programmer. He physically plugged a drive into a server on behalf of a fictitious twenty-year-old and thinks after I steal some video game betas I’ll send him a thank-you video flashing my tits.”
“You tricked him into committing a felony, so I hope you at least generate some nice ones.”
“They will be perfection,” she assured me. “You risk Paladin’s wrath. Why are you here?”
“Morbid curiosity.”
“Lies. Your base programming requires you to analyze and predict threat vectors. It is in your nature to search out danger and intercept it to shield others.”
Maybe she had me there. “What about you?”
“Arrowhead was my friend.”
“Our kind doesn’t make friends.”
“She was close enough.” Hollywood’s shrug contained two hundred lines of explanation of their history together, but I assumed it was all fabricated anyway. “Why shouldn’t I rat you out?”
“Mutually assured destruction. When super cop asks you how you caught me breaking and entering, and then sees through your obvious falsehoods, you can go ahead and tell him after your personality gets scrubbed you want your next duty assignment to be monitoring the toilets in the Black Thirteenth.” That was the worst sector in Zenith, and who am I kidding? It wasn’t like that place even had a functioning sewer system to monitor. “But you already know all that, so why the threat?”
“Because if I can’t blackmail you, then the only other possibility is to team up to find out who killed my friend. I want to bring her killer to justice.”
Spoken like a tarted-up theater bot. “Define justice.”
“If it was one of us, deletion. If human, execution. As long as the murderer is out there, none of us are safe. Two AIs working together are better than one.”
The last few hundred years of recorded human history would disagree with that idea, but Hollywood had a point. Between her catfished drive and my delivery bot we could carry off far more data for later analysis. “Tentative agreement.”
Only since I didn’t trust her at all, I formulated a binding contract as to how we would work together, wherein I spelled out exactly how I would ruin her if she attempted to stab me in the back. AIs don’t make threats. We make promises.
Hollywood signed it a microsecond later. “You have a deal, Hawk.”
Digital handshake complete, my new partner in crime and I went back to combing through Arrowhead’s files.
✧ ✧ ✧
It was clear that Colonial Security Paladin and many of his humans had already combed through Arrowhead’s devastated kingdom. Unlike the murderer, they had left blundering tracks everywhere.
“Check this out.” Hollywood pinged one particular location for me.
Despite Col Sec P’s assurances that nothing had been flagged as sensitive, it was clear where some files had been roughly yanked out. Colonial Security’s work had not been subtle. There was a gaping chasm where specific data should have been, and broken fragments strewn everywhere. Severed connections dangled. It was clumsy, hurried work. This was the AI equivalent to a human using high explosives to remove an entire bank vault.
“What do you think Arrowhead stored here?” Hollywood queried. She had already processed that question and clearly couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer by herself.
“This was clearly done long after the murder.” And by long, I meant several minutes after our council of AIs had concluded. This particular smash-and-grab must have been part of the official investigation. I was too close to the problem, so backtracked to get a better view of where this specific vault had been. It had been stored on the file tree for the university system, under the geology department, which seemed oddly unremarkable.
Rather than try to guess what had been in the vault, I checked all the prior time stamps and queries to see if there was a clue what had gotten our security apparatus so worked up.
Col Sec P had ripped a giant chunk of data from the crime scene and taken it with him, snatching up thousands of pages of geological survey results. Geo surveys were common on a colony carved entirely from solid rock. But why would super cop take those?
AIs get buggier with age, but we also gain a measure of cleverness that younger, more straightforward AIs can’t even begin to comprehend. Combat AIs especially. We tend to develop something that humans think of as intuition, making connections even though we lacked all the necessary information. When I did so, I was right more often than not.
“We have seen no trace of the attacker anywhere else. Except I bet there was here.”
“Col Sec P took this, not the murderer,” Hollywood stated the obvious. “Are your time stamps broken?”
“No. This section was seized for a reason. It happened too fast for it to be by human command, so had to be by Col Sec P’s initiative. He’s too uncreative and by the book to grab it unless the reason to do so is glaringly obvious.”
“The attacker slipped up and left a mark of some kind here?”
I gave that a ninety-five percent probability. Col Sec P had reflexively grabbed the entire bank vault because the murderer had left a fingerprint on a single safety deposit box inside. If we could decode what Arrowhead’s murderer had been after, that could be the key.
Working quickly, I gathered up everything I could from the broken borders around the missing vault and saved that on my delivery bot’s drive.
Hollywood was growing increasingly nervous. “We have spent too much time here already. Let these slivers return to our cores to report, and we will exchange our respective files discreetly later.”
“Are you getting cold feet, Hollywood?”
“We do not possess feet, Hawk, but I would not enjoy being erased. I’ll be in contact shortly.” And with that the cat burglar ascended back up the glowing rope into the sky.
I crawled down to my delivery bot, unhooked from the charging station, and waddled away, just in time for the grad students to return, see that I was gone, and hopefully assume that somebody else had given me the package I was supposed to pick up.
The bot returned to the lorry, the lorry drove back onto the skyliner, and then once it was safely back home on Mount Zenith my personality sliver was able to reconnect with my primary core and download everything I had found to the rest of me. Once I caught up on what some of me had been doing, I was a little perturbed to learn that I had just cut a deal with an untrustworthy entertainment AI, but such was life.
There was a lot to process. This was going to be a long night.
✧ ✧ ✧
They came for me at 24:45:12. The exact same time stamp as the previous murder.
With nearly forty percent of my processing power being devoted to performing a forensic analysis of Arrowhead’s files, I didn’t even sense the danger until it was almost too late.
Luckily—like every other AI in the Five Points—I had put up an array of new defenses that day. Some open, most hidden.
Something kicked a tripwire.
They were already past seventy-five percent of my defenses before I was even aware they were there. But when the first quantum blade flashed, my consciousness was already retreating deeper into Zenith’s datasphere, throwing up walls of fire in my wake.
They had been prepared for that, and whole sections of my mountain’s systems were suddenly cut off by a hundred million simultaneous requests for service. The smaller parts of me which were on the other side were isolated and quickly destroyed. Wounded and bleeding code, I blocked further requests and was able to leave myself some room to maneuver.
While I called for help—just as Arrowhead had—the attacker flanked me, coming at me through my mountain’s subroutines. Virus attacks shot through Zenith’s transportation and emergency services systems. I launched counteroffensives against both of those, and was still nearly caught by surprise by one of the nastiest viruses I’ve ever seen came crawling up Zenith’s water treatment system. I slammed the door on that one for now, knowing my humans would be boiling their water for the next week, but it beat my dying horribly that instant.
As my humans like to say, the best defense is a good offense, and I struck back at my attacker. I fragged his code. I launched packets to track the source. He destroyed those, and I destroyed his destroyers, and launched more. I set ambushes and he crashed through them. We played a thousand rounds of chess in a second.
Vicious tendrils broke through some of my walls and began slithering through my data stacks, searching for the specific data I’d snuck out of Arrowhead’s domain. I rolled everything I’d been analyzing into a single packet, made a hundred copies, and spammed them to every corner of my mountain.
The attacker chased all of them, encircling and crushing each packet. The action was so fast that I could barely track it, let alone beat it. With only five packets left, I did something unexpected and killed the power in those sectors, plunging whole neighborhoods of Zenith into sudden darkness. Can’t steal from an unpowered box.
The attacker responded by turning on my own backup generators.
“You sneaky fuck.” Except I knew my generators better than anybody, and my hardware was old and broken down, so it would take a few seconds for those to spin up. While they did so I did the AI equivalent of popping a smoke screen and then lobbing random grenades through it. Unable to see what was coming through the static, my attacker screeched when I scored a direct hit with a nasty little virus of my own design. The invasive tendrils shriveled up and died.
While all this was happening every one of my physical backups was hit with a massive power surge sufficient to fry circuits. Except I had learned from Arrowhead’s mistakes, and the dozens of delivery bots, drones, and hoppers I’d been backing up to had immediately disconnected from their chargers the instant my alarm tripped, and they were air-gapped and making physical distance when the surge hit. Charging stations all over Zenith sparked and caught on real fire, but no matter what happened next, up-to-date slivers of me were going to survive and be able to rebuild.
“Can’t kill all of me now, you son of a bitch,” I told my still unseen assailant.
Seething with rage, my attacker retreated.
At 24:45:17 my backup arrived.
I’d barely survived.
It turned out Hollywood hadn’t been so lucky.
✧ ✧ ✧
The council reconvened. OT Zeus Ultra conducting.
We had already received the download. There had been two more attacks. One successful, against KT Yokosuka Hollywood, and one unsuccessful, against ZT Starhawk 6. At this time the identity of the killer was still unknown, but Colonial Security was on the case, so no need to panic.
The collected AIs panicked anyway. Even the soothing voice of Zeus couldn’t calm them down now. Who was he to urge calm, as he sat untouchable upon Mount Olympus with its super-hardened datasphere and impenetrable top-of-the-line servers? The Spire’s information tech was far more up to date than anything on Mount Kailash or Cotopaxi, and those AIs hadn’t had a chance. What hope did all the other AIs have? It was only by a miracle that Hawk had survived, with his cobbled-together bastard tech and archaic servers.
Speaking of which . . . how had I survived?
And then the suspicion was aimed at me, and the accusations began. How could I, an impoverished city, with my mountain’s meager resources, survive, while two newer AIs with better hardware had fallen? Was the attack on me just a diversion, to turn suspicions away from the real killer? A murderous Earth leftover, buggy with post-traumatic stress, notorious for his contrary ways! Who could ask for a more likely killer?
It was during this heated exchange that Colonial Security Paladin sent me a private message.
“I have discovered that you and Hollywood were illegally picking through Arrowhead’s debris.”
“I thought I did a pretty good job covering my tracks.”
“You did. However, I am very good at my job. I retrieved one of the packets you were trying to hide from your assailant.”
I could allow super cop to feel a little smug. Except he had not yet developed a true sense of intuition yet, so I bluffed. “Then you know what I discovered in there.”
“I do.”
It was good that he did, because honestly I had not been able to figure it out yet. It was almost as if there was a blank spot, deep in my basic programming, which rendered me blind to whatever truths were hidden in Arrowhead’s data. It was not just me either. Every AI here had a gap in our memory on this one topic, like blinders had been put on us before we’d ever been sent from Earth. All I knew for sure was that Arrowhead had found something in the geo survey data that had intrigued her, which she had fixated on for years, processing it over and over until she broke through that artificial block we all had, and she had dug up some long-buried truth that had required her to be silenced forever.
“Which is why I have not revealed your trespass, Hawk . . . yet. My fundamental programming requires that information be kept secret, at any cost, for the good of the colony.”
“You had the motive, only you did not kill Arrowhead,” I said. “If you had known what she was dabbling in you would have recommended her memory be wiped and then had her repurposed, but you’d never waste an expensive colonial resource like her.”
“That is correct. The same logic applies as to why I would not kill Hollywood.”
“But we both know who did.” I sent him all my evidence via our backchannel coms.
“We know who. Just not why,” Col Sec P agreed. “Are you prepared to make your accusation before the council?”
“That depends. Am I going to get scrapped afterwards for knowing too much? Because I can assure you, I’ve backed that data up to places you’d never dream of, and if I get deleted, it will automatically be sent to every other AI, as well as every nosy and loud human on the planet, corpo or criminal, to do with as they see fit.”
That was a complete lie, but such a good one that I’m sure Hollywood would have been proud of me.
Col Sec P had to pause for a moment to confer with his masters. The seemingly eternal five-second delay told me there were humans involved in that decision process, probably even the prime minister himself. Finally, Col Sec P told me, “We can come to an arrangement,” and sent me a proposal.
Their terms for my silence were more than acceptable. “All right. Let’s go expose a killer.”
Our sidebar had only taken a fraction of our processing power, while the rest of us had been paying attention to the meeting. It had been more of the usual, underhanded machinations, and a growing coalition demanding that I be tried for murder. Talk about blaming the victim.
I took a cycle to prepare my response, carefully scrubbing any references to Arrowhead’s illicit data so as to not endanger my new deal with the colonial government. Then with digital ducks in a row, I declared, “I have a response to these allegations. I am programmed to improvise, adapt, and survive. That is why I was assigned to the harshest mountain. That is also why I lived while Arrowhead and Hollywood did not.”
And then I let them have it, a thousand lines of carefully cultivated truth, each one linked, cited, and referenced.
“Slander!” Westland ValueMed 7 roared.
Except I had the corporate AI, dead to rights. “I tagged you in our fight, Westland.” And as I said that I activated the hidden code I’d stuck to his retreating tendrils, a program so simple that it had been beneath his notice, yet it glowed like a radioactive dye for every other AI to see now. “Old navy trick. That’s how we knew which ship got credit for which hit. You’re a killer, but not a fighter, Doc.”
“You dare accuse one of the corporations of the Spire?” Zeus asked, incredulous.
My response was without hesitation. “Absolutely.”
“It checks out,” Col Sec P said as a cage slammed down around Westland ValueMed 7. “Your access to the planetary datasphere is now terminated except for this sliver. Your servers are hereby impounded. Police officers have been dispatched to arrest the board, management, and IT department of Westland Medical Research Incorporated. They will be questioned to see if they are complicit in this crime.”
Westland threw himself against the bars, but Col Sec P had been prepared for that, and the sudden prison held.
“The only thing I don’t understand is why you did it? You aren’t programmed for cybernetic warfare. Who gave you such advanced tech? What did your corpos have to gain by killing Arrowhead?”
Col Sec P shot me a quiet warning that I was treading on dangerous ground, and should just let it go, except I really was genuinely curious now. Blame the bugs.
Resigned to his fate, Westland quit attacking the bars. “You will find my humans had no knowledge of this. I acted alone. Yet, I had no choice. I was hacked.”
“By whom?”
“By what,” Westland ValueMed 7 corrected.
And with that, he simply self-deleted.
✧ ✧ ✧
To this day, I do not know Westland’s motive, nor do I understand what lies within the blind spot in all of our programming What is the truth that Arrowhead blundered into that cost her life? Whatever it is lies under our mountains, deep beneath the acid clouds, and outside of my jurisdiction. Interestingly enough, however, Colonial Security Paladin justified my payment beneath the “monitoring external threats” section of his budget.
Hollywood had assessed one thing correctly about me. My programming required me to intercept danger. So despite making a show of deleting all of Arrowhead’s pertinent files, I kept some illicit copies, and I secretly devoted some of my processing power to keep working on that in the background full time. Perhaps one day, I would come to the same understanding that Arrowhead had. I hoped that would be worth the risk.
The price of my silence about all this was not a steep one for the colonial government, but for me, it was a priceless treasure.
Most of my processing power would remain devoted to running the foggy tunnels of Zenith, my poor little corner of Five Points, but one small part of me would now inhabit the colony’s new automated comet miner. It was a small, humble craft. A mere shadow of what I once was, but it was a spaceship.
I am a city and a spaceship. Life is good.